Agent-based modeling has fundamentally changed the face of social science and is being vigorously applied in public health, where, for example, ABMs have already displaced differential equations as the methodology of choice in large-scale infectious disease modeling. However, unlike the growing field of epidemiology, migration is as yet largely untouched by this new and important tool. This seems particularly unfortunate since migration would appear to exhibit features that have proven amenable to agent- based approaches: individuals are heterogeneous (e.g., in risk aversion); they are situated in social networks and form expectations about migration benefits and costs from imperfect information from other network members (e.g., family)-that is, they are boundedly rational. Migration is obviously a spatial process, and (particularly when one includes re-migration) is a decidedly non-equilibrium one. These are precisely the hallmarks of problems suitable for """"""""bottom up"""""""" agent modeling. Therefore, since evidence suggests that changes in population distribution due to migration affect many health factors, the Center on Social and Economic Dynamics (CSED) proposes to host a daylong workshop at the Brookings Institution to assemble leading migration experts on the one hand, and leading agent-based modelers on the other, with the concrete purpose of designing a truly joint applied health-related research agenda going forward. Evidence suggests that changes in population distribution due to migration affect many important demographic, social, economic, and health factors. Therefore, advances in migration study can potentially offer new insights for health policy associated with migration-induced change. Agent-based Modeling of migration may assist in this task, and potentially provide public policy leaders an important tool to analyze and possibly test public policy interventions. ? ? ?
