Bulletin November 2007

IN THIS ISSUE...

Migration: some circular reasoning
Labour migration is a crucial piece in the jigsaw puzzle of globalisation; yet it is frequently misunderstood. Debate is often couched as though the only foreign workers were those who arrive in search of a job, bring their families along, and never go home again. In fact, as Amelie Constant and Klaus Zimmermann reveal in a new CEPR Discussion Paper, migrants often shuttle back and forth to their home country many times over the years; and this phenomenon of 'circular migration' is sometimes driven by surprising factors.

Politicians: the (square) root of all evil?
Voters in democracies all over the world can often feel they have too many politicians. In France and Italy, they are probably right - whereas in the USA, they could benefit from having a few more. That's what CEPR Reseachers Emmanuelle Auriol and Robert Gary-Bobo suggest, based on a simplified statistical model of a democracy which helps to answer the question: what is the optimal number of representatives?

Open economy micro
The Industrial Revolution created what has become known as the 'great divergence': some countries experienced a sudden, once-and-for-all jump to a much faster rate of growth, while others continued stagnating. Tow new CEPR Discussion Papers present a 'unified growth theory' to explain this divergence, and describe how the openness of societies to cultural diffusion from outside is key to the pace of economic development.

E Pluribus Unum
In a new CEPR discussion paper, Michael Ehrmann, Marcel Fratzscher, Refet Gurkaynak and Eric Swanson use data from eurozone bond markets to test whether monetary union has really succeeded in integrating European financial markets.