Here we are on a road between the Waddenzee which I can see to my left and the Ijsselmeer to my right . These Dutch certainly know how to control the sea .We have tried in the past in Norfolk where the land lies low . We did not do a bad job emulating the

Tonight I was supposed to be boarding a plane at JFK Airport in New York. Sixteen hours later I was going to disembark in Manila. My epic trip this year was to be five weeks in Asia. The first three weeks I was going to travel around the Philippines for t

Gabby the virtual motorhome is on her virtual tour having now reached the lovely Lubeck . Lubeck was one of those places we first saw and read about in blogs. Other peoples blogs. Stories of parking up and wandering through its quaint walls into its equall

86400 That is a large number . It is a number you never think about . At the start of the day as you wake you don't give a thought to so many figures . I never did. That was until I read something that told me how many seconds there were in a day . Giv

My virtual trip has taken me to Denmark . Another country added to the list and another magnet purchased for the board in the kitchen . So thoughts on Denmark . I wonder what the roads will be like. Will they resemble the de dum de dum roads of Belgium or

Day 23 Gabby the motorhome is still on furlough . We keep checking on her . To make sure she is Ok . That she is not missing us as much as we are missing her.Walking makes you stop and think . Instead of a mind racing on important things it goes i

I love walking on my own. It is never a lonely experience. There is too much to see and too much to take in . Even on Day 24 of the lockdown I am still finding nooks and a cranny or two in our village that I have never investigated before . Yes I am coveri

I take a sharp intake of breath as I test what the air temperature is outside . The chill of the frosty night has not yet been burned away that frosty morning feeling. My breath comes out like a thick wisp of smoke. I need my gilet on today to keep me warm

Sometimes you have to try something different . Chesterfield area is not all Peak District pretty . Nor is full to the brim with pretty stone cottages . Stone walls fields and Bluebell Woods . There is another side . The A61 divides the two halves . The P

Snuggling up inside the duvet it was hard to make the decision to wake up fully and rise . The sun was slowly rising above the trees . There was a hint of a chilly morning out of the sun . Walking early is a pleasure before the rest of the world has woken

The brain this morning does not want to function . One side is saying get up get moving get out . The other side replies in a negative fashion . Let me stay in bed a bit longer. My foot aches . Underneath and on top. Shoes are rubbing toes from so much

I took TX State Hwy 7 East to Center Texas for a good day. I took TX Hwy 87 SE to Shelbyville the first brief county seat for Shelby County and the Fire Department is my first pic in the City of Shelbyville. A block West of Fire Department is the First

Are you getting up The navigator woke early this morning . I never heard him getting up . He was standing at the bottom of the bed What about your walk Are you bothering this morning I had made plans yesterday for todays walk . On the way home

It is Sunday. The shine is shining . It is a day of rest . But each day feels like a day of rest . Everyday feels like a Sunday. I could turn over fall asleep and have a late breakfast . Somehow along the way over the last 30 days walking has become an

Morning all I guess you will all be up and greeting the dawn . Sleep did not come easy last night . Tossing and turning . You get nights like that at times . Hoping that once your head hits the pillow you will fall asleep . Some nights you do. Others the

The butterfly counts not months but moments and has time enough Rabindranath Tagore one of my favourites. I saw the first butterfly of the season today . A Cabbage White the scourge of gardeners who love their cabbages . The pretty white things lays

I won't lie to you. My brain was Ok this morning accepting the fact that a walk was on the way after breakfast . It also knew that today was shopping day . The day of a telekit from work. It was my feet that were complaining . Complaining loudly at that

The early morning dawn light was streaming in through the window . The time seemed irrelevant . It was still not quite light enough to rise . Looking at my watch I hoped the green luminous fingers would give me a clue to the time . It felt like 5am. The fi

Yesterday it was horses birds coots on the pond rabbits and squirrels . Today chickens. Guinea Fowl a bit of an odd sight around the village as they walked alongside me. My plan was to head out into the countryside . Luckily living on the spine of Eng

The work of fiction known as the weather forecast has been giving us a sandwich message the last few days. The good news the bread of the sandwich has been that April has been a lovely month . No April showers. Wall to wall sunshine. Then came the fillin

Thankyou to my travelblog friend you know who you are for introducing the colour Borage Blue to my collection of colours . She told me that the plant I struggled finding a name for yesterday was Borage . An electric blue and a stunning plant .Anothe

Shall I let you into a little secret oh go on then . I am quite enjoying this walking . Lying in bed unable to drop off to sleep I sorted out in my mind where I was walking to in the morning . The weather whas a let down . Over the past few weeks someone

Is that rain I hear Gently tapping on the window . I cannot hear anything as I lie under the bedclothes . I am sure it is raining . The work of fiction the weather forecaster got it right . April is going out in the way April should go out . Light ra

It was not the aching feet that were stopping me in my tracks . To be fair they were burning . This walking plays havoc with the arches of your feet . It was not my brain working overtime thinking of reasons not to go out . Although it would have been easy

Rain it can be quite therapeutic . When it patters on Gabbys roof it can lull you into sleep . When it hammers down it is worse than listening to Ginger Baker and Keith Moon on their drumkits on the roof. It does the garden good . But lying in bed listen

Today should have been the day. It is going to be a day of would have could have and should have again. We would have been waking up on the park and ride paid our fee to exit and driven the M2 down to the tunnel . We should have been sitting in the car

Goedemorgen to you all . We would have probably woken up in Belgium this morning having dined on waffles or frites last night . I am sure that the sun would be shining as we rose . The sun has arrived here so the chances are Belgium would have been just as

Did you know that there was a connection between our large 7000 inhabitant village of Wingerworth Randolph Hearst and the a museum across the pond in St Louis No neither did I until I treated our village as if I were a visitor on a first visit . As a v

Yesterday was Day 45 Our five o'clock briefing was delivered by the less than charismatic Mr Gove who told us more of the same . He spelled out the numbers of deaths the numbers of tests that had been undertaken. The numbers rolled off his tongue . Traf

Reaching Blog 100 on Chesterfield who would have believed it Not me. Sometimes I would write something about my home town. Most of the time though blogs were about somewhere else . Covid 19 has scuppered any chance of a blog from out of town for a whil

Back in 2008 we finally got to attend the most exciting two minutes in sports the Kentucky Derby. The Derby is always run on the first Saturday in May until this year. We finally arrived in Louisville around dinner time on Thursday. Our plane to Ch

Surfacing this morning was difficult . It is a work day today . Last night we had a frost . Not a heavy one . Not the sort of frost you get in the Winter . Not the sort of frost that you have to scrape off the car windscreen. But a frost nevertheless . The

It is dark when I wake . It is Day 48 of the lockdown . The sun has not risen and the birds have not woken. It is Thursday . Sage are meeting today with our government . Sage used to be that herb that you stuffed up a chicken together with onion . Now it i

Since you seem to like my wine emails here is a subject near and dear to us Californians. French wine. Let me start out by saying this about the French. They love to bad mouth Napa Valley after their BIG loss decades ago. On most wine tours in Franc

I woke early again . The bedroom was still in darkness . Tossing about I found I could not get back to sleep. My mind was going round and round . Odd thoughts . Day 49 how many hours have we been locked down. 1176 hours or thereabouts. I could have begun

Morning she shouted across the road . Morning I replied . Busy isn't it I thought it was lockdown Yes seems like a lot of people still travelling in their cars was my reply. We agreed the lady on her morning walk and I that this was a lovel

Having spent 2 months travelling to the north south east and west of China it is time to leave.After a lot of consideration our next port of call will be Myanmar. Human Rights violations decrease in areas where there are international visitors

Well i've really started to get to know some locals guys that come in quite a bit. One of my fav regulars Dan is a kiwi but has been over here and all over the world for a long time. Anyways he's 38 years old and has just retired. He's got it pretty go

If you asked us two weeks ago what the meaning of 'luxury' was we probably would have said 'a Porche' or 'dinner at a Michelin starred resturant' By the time we arrived back in Ulanbatar after our ten day Gobi Desert tour luxury meant running water a

From flooding to Benefits Street, the rise of Ukip to the Apple Watch, the year was filled with huge, grim events. We could all use a lie-down over Christmas

So 2014’s almost done, and unless you got married, or had your firstborn, or won a Subaru filled with Maltesers in a radio phone-in, it’s unlikely to be a year you’ll remember fondly. It was filled with huge, grim events. So is every year, of course, but in 2014 it seemed there were fewer light moments to offset the enveloping dread. And everyone seemed angry, all the time. A whole planet, gritting its teeth. Hundreds protesting. Thousands marching. Millions waiting to attach their internalised rage to a hashtag at a moment’s notice. We could all use a lie-down over Christmas.

The year started badly for Britain when the sky decided to waterboard the lot of us. It rained incessantly throughout early January; big grey raindrops the size of cupboards. The government issued snorkels to anyone under 5ft 4in, while areas of Devon were submerged for so long the residents evolved gills and blowholes.

We study the impact of non-pharmaceutical policy interventions (NPIs) like “stay-at-home” orders on the spread of infectious disease. NPIs are associated with slower growth of Covid-19 cases. NPIs “spillover” into other jurisdictions. NPIs are not associated with significantly worse economic outcomes measured by job losses. Job losses have been no higher in US states that implemented “stay-at-home” during the Covid-19 pandemic than in states that did not have “stay-at-home”. All of these results demonstrate that the Covid-19 pandemic is a common economic and public health shock. The tradeoff between the economy and public health today depends strongly on what is happening elsewhere. This underscores the importance of coordinated economic and public health responses.

Ambient pollution is a byproduct of economic activity. It has been widely reported that COVID-19 and associated lockdowns have generated large improvements in air quality worldwide, including to China's notoriously-poor air quality. We analyze China's official pollution monitor data and account for the large, recurrent improvement in air quality following Lunar New Year (LNY), which essentially coincided with lockdowns in 2020. With the important exception of NO2, China's air quality improvements in 2020 are smaller than we should expect near the pandemic's epicenter: Hubei province. Compared with LNY improvements experienced in 2018 and 2019 in Hubei, we see smaller improvements in SO2 while ozone concentrations increased in both relative and absolute terms (roughly doubling). Similar patterns are found for the six provinces neighboring Hubei. We conclude that whether COVID-19 actually decreased pollution in China depends on the pollutant and reference period considered.

We conducted a large-scale survey covering 58 countries and over 100,000 respondents between late March and early April 2020 to study beliefs and attitudes towards citizens’ and governments’ responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. Most respondents reacted strongly to the crisis: they report engaging in social distancing and hygiene behaviors, and believe that strong policy measures, such as shop closures and curfews, are necessary. They also believe that their government and their country’s citizens are not doing enough and underestimate the degree to which others in their country support strong behavioral and policy responses to the pandemic. The perception of a weak government and public response is associated with higher levels of worries and depression. Using both cross-country panel data and an event-study, we additionally show that strong government reactions correct misperceptions, and reduce worries and depression. Our findings highlight that policy-makers not only need to consider how their decisions affect the spread of COVID-19, but also how such choices influence the mental health of their population.

Do new societal needs increase charitable giving or simply reallocate a fixed supply of donations? We study this question using IRS datasets and the natural experiment of deadly tornadoes. Among ZIP Codes located more than 20 miles away from a tornado's path, donations by households increase by over $1 million per tornado fatality. We find no negative effects on charities located in these ZIP Codes, with a bootstrapped confidence interval that rejects substitution rates above 16 percent. The results imply that giving to one cause need not come at the expense of another.

Despite widespread interest, there is little systematic evidence on the relationship between income, wealth, and charitable giving. We use the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to provide descriptive statistics on this relationship. We find that, irrespective of specifica­tion, donative behavior increases with greater resources.

We explored two measures of inequality that described the full income distribution in cities. One measure is an income gini based on family incomes in 1929 for 33 cities and in 1933 for up to 48 cities in 1933 were spread throughout the country. We also estimated gini coefficients that made use of contract rents for renters and implicit rents for home owners for up to 955 cities throughout the country. We were able to expand to all counties when looking at a top-end inequality measure, the number of taxpayers per family. All three measures varied substantially across the country. We show the correlations between the various measures and also estimate the relationship between the measures and various relief programs developed by governments at all levels during the period.

We study a novel policy tool—interest rate uncertainty—that can be used to discourage inefficient capital inflows and to adjust the composition of external accounts between short-term securities and foreign direct investment (FDI). We identify the trade-offs faced in navigating between external balance and price stability. The interest rate uncertainty policy discourages short-term inflows mainly through portfolio risk and precautionary saving channels. A markup channel generates net FDI inflows under imperfect exchange rate pass-through. We further investigate new channels under different assumptions about the irreversibility of FDI, the currency of export invoicing, risk aversion of outside agents, and effective lower bound in the rest of the world. Under every scenario, uncertainty policy is inflationary.

This paper documents a new fact, then analyzes its causes and consequences: in most countries, import tariffs and non-tariff barriers are substantially lower on dirty than on clean industries, where an industry’s “dirtiness” is defined as its carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions per dollar of output. This difference in trade policy creates a global implicit subsidy to CO2 emissions in internationally traded goods and so contributes to climate change. This global implicit subsidy to CO2 emissions totals several hundred billion dollars annually. The greater protection of downstream industries, which are relatively clean, substantially accounts for this pattern. The downstream pattern can be explained by theories where industries lobby for low tariffs on their inputs but final consumers are poorly organized. A quantitative general equilibrium model suggests that if countries applied similar trade policies to clean and dirty goods, global CO2 emissions would decrease and global real income would change little.

We estimate valuations of time using detailed consumer choice data from a large European ride hail platform, where drivers bid on trips and consumers choose between a set of potential rides with different prices and waiting times. We estimate consumer demand as a function of prices and waiting times. While demand is responsive to both, price elasticities are on average four times higher than waiting-time elasticities. We show how these estimates can be mapped into values of time that vary by place, person, and time of day. Regarding variation within a day, the value of time during non-work hours is 16% lower than during work hours. Regarding the spatial dimension, our value of time measures are highly correlated both with real estate prices and urban GPS travel flows. A variance decomposition reveals that most of the substantial heterogeneity in the value of time is explained by individual differences as opposed to place or time of day. In contrast with other studies that focus on long run choices we do not find evidence of spatial sorting. We apply our measures to quantify the opportunity cost of traffic congestion in Prague, which we estimate at $483,000 per day.

We study the trade-offs faced by Internet Service Providers (ISPs) that serve as platforms through which consumers access both television and internet services. As online streaming video improves, these providers may respond by attempting to steer consumers away from streaming video toward their own TV services, or by attempting to capture surplus from this improved internet content. We augment the standard mixed bundling model to demonstrate the trade-offs the ISP faces when dealing with streaming video, and we show how these trade-offs change with the pricing options available to the ISP. Next, we use unique household-level panel data and the introduction of usage-based pricing (UBP) in a subset of markets to measure consumers' responses and to evaluate quantitatively the ISP's trade-offs. We find that the introduction of UBP led consumers to upgrade their internet service plans and lower overall internet usage. Our findings suggest that while steering consumers towards TV services is possible, it is likely costly for the ISP and therefore unlikely to be profitable. This is especially true if the ISP can offer rich pricing menus that allow it to capture some of the surplus generated by a better internet service. The results suggest that policies like UBP can increase ISPs' incentive to maintain open access to new internet content.