Explaining International Migration in the Skype Network: The Role of Social Network Features

Abstract

In recent years, several new ways have appeared for quantifying human migration such as location based smartphone applications and tracking user activity from websites. To show usefulness of these new approaches, we present the results of a study of cross-country migration as observed via login events in the Skype network. We explore possibility to extract human migration and correlate it with institutional statistics. The study demonstrates that a number of social network features are strongly related to net migration from and to a given country, as well as net migration between pairs of countries. Specifically, we find that percentage of international calls, percentage of international links and foreign logins in a country, complemented by gross domestic product, can be used as relatively accurate proxies for estimating migration.