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.

European researchers have developed a new technology aimed at slowing the spread of the novel coronavirus. Called PEPP-PT, it has been designed to conform with EU data privacy rules. Its developers spoke with DER SPIEGEL about the app.

Faced with a growing economic crisis, many European Union member states are clamoring for the introduction of so-called corona bonds. Just like it was in the euro crisis, though, Germany is opposed. In the end, Berlin may not have a choice. By DER SPIEGEL Staff

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.

Banks usually hold large amounts of domestic public debt which makes them vulnerable to their own sovereign’s default risk. At the same time, governments often resort to costly public bailouts when their domestic banking sector is in trouble. We investigate how the interbank network structure and the distribution of sovereign debt holdings jointly affect the optimal bailout policy in the presence of this "doom loop". Rescuing banks with high domestic sovereign exposure is optimal if these banks are sufficiently central in the network, even though that requires larger bailout expenditures than rescuing low-exposure banks. Our findings imply that highly central banks can use exposure to their own government as a strategic tool to increase the likelihood of being bailed out. Our model thus illustrates how the "doom loop" exacerbates the "too interconnected to fail" problem in banking.

Estimating the returns to education remains an active area of research amongst applied economists. Most studies that estimate the causal return to education exploit changes in schooling and/or labor laws to generate exogenous differences in education. An implicit assumption is that more time in school may translate into greater earnings potential. None of these studies, however, explicitly consider the quality of schooling to which impacted students are exposed. To extend this literature, we examine the interaction between school quality and policy-induced returns to schooling, using temporally-available school quality measures from Card and Krueger (1992). We find that additional compulsory schooling, via either schooling or labor laws, increases earnings only if educational inputs are of sufficiently high quality. In particular, we find a consistent role for teacher quality, as measured by relative teacher pay across states, in generating consistently positive returns to compulsory schooling.

Traveling beyond the immediate surroundings of one’s residence can lead to greater exposure to new ideas and information, jobs, and greater transmission of disease. In this paper, we document the geographic mobility of individuals in the U.S., and how this mobility varies across U.S. cities, regions, and income classes. Using geolocation data for ~1.7 million smartphone users over a 10-month period, we compute different measures of mobility, including the total distance traveled, the median daily distance traveled, the maximum distance traveled from one’s home, and the number of unique haunts visited. We find large differences across cities and income groups. For example, people in New York travel 38% fewer total kilometers and visit 14% fewer block-sized areas than people in Atlanta. And, individuals in the bottom income quartile travel 12% less overall and visit 13% fewer total locations than the top income quartile.

Broward County Sheriff Gregory Tony is getting a political baptism by fire in an election that reads like a Hollywood screenplay with racy photos, a secret decades-old killing and a bitter union fight.

Disney World is beginning to spring into action. Disney Springs, the company’s outdoor dining, shopping and entertainment complex near its Florida theme parks, is set to begin a phased reopening on May 20 following closures to reduce the spread of coronavirus.

The authors want to transform the home where they raised their children in Bangor, Maine, into the location for Stephen King’s personal archives. A guest house they own next door would host writers in residence.

Former NFL quarterback Michael Vick is selling his Plantation home, listed at $2.399 million.

Thanks to virtual tours, online mortgage applications, remote notarization and tech tools like Facetime, real estate agents in South Florida are still conducting business these days.

What are the characteristics of workers in jobs likely to be initially affected by broad social distancing and later by narrower policy tailored to jobs with low risk of disease transmission? We use O NET to construct a measure of the likelihood that jobs can be conducted from home (a variant of Dingel and Neiman, 2020) and a measure of low physical proximity to others at work. We validate the measures by showing how they relate to similar measures constructed using time use data from ATUS. Our main finding is that workers in low-work-from-home or high-physical- proximity jobs are more economically vulnerable across various measures constructed from the CPS and PSID: they are less educated, of lower income, have fewer liquid assets relative to income, and are more likely renters. We further substantiate the measures with behavior during the epidemic. First, we show that MSAs with less pre-virus employment in work-from-home jobs experienced smaller declines in the incidence of `staying-at-home', as measured using SafeGraph cell phone data. Second, we show that both occupations and types of workers predicted to be employed in low work-from-home jobs experienced greater declines in employment according to the March 2020 CPS. For example, non-college educated workers experienced a 4ppt larger decline in employment relative to those with a college degree.

The lack of reliable electricity in the developing world is widely viewed by policymakers as a major constraint on firm productivity. Yet most empirical studies find modest short-run effects of power outages on firm performance. This paper builds a dynamic macroeconomic model to study the long-run general equilibrium effects of power outages on productivity. The model captures the key features of how firms acquire electricity in the developing world, in particular the rationing of grid electricity and the possibility of self-generated electricity at higher cost. Power outages lower productivity in the model by creating idle resources, by depressing the scale of incumbent firms and by reducing entry of new firms. Consistent with the empirical literature, the model predicts that the short-run partial-equilibrium effects of eliminating outages are small. However, the long-run general-equilibrium effects are many times larger, supporting the view that eliminating outages is an important development objective.

We show a causal impact of immigration on innovation and dynamism in US counties. To identify the causal impact of immigration, we use 130 years of detailed data on migrations from foreign countries to US counties to isolate quasi-random variation in the ancestry composition of US counties that results purely from the interaction of two historical forces: (i) changes over time in the relative attractiveness of different destinations within the US to the average migrant arriving at the time and (ii) the staggered timing of the arrival of migrants from different origin countries. We then use this plausibly exogenous variation in ancestry composition to predict the total number of migrants flowing into each US county in recent decades. We show four main results. First, immigration has a positive impact on innovation, measured by the patenting of local firms. Second, immigration has a positive impact on measures of local economic dynamism. Third, the positive impact of immigration on innovation percolates over space, but spatial spillovers quickly die out with distance. Fourth, the impact of immigration on innovation is stronger for more educated migrants.

A Brooklyn woman was slashed in the face with a knife by an enraged passenger after her child threw up on a city bus.

The boy was walking behind a building on Coyle St. near Ave. U in Sheepshead Bay at about 6 p.m. Jan. 25, when the robber ran up on the youngster from behind, police said Sunday.

School officials tweeted the meetings can take place by phone or videochat, but no longer in-person. If parents can’t reach their kids’ teachers during their scheduled conference times, schools will try to accommodate them later this month, officials said.

Repeat Software are delighted to welcome Optima Digital Inc., as a reseller partner in the Philippines. Optima Digital has more than 60 PLDT stores in the Philippines using Repeat Signage Media Wall software.

No doubt, media content is very important  when it comes to updating your blogs and social network pages. We totally understand that and constantly improve images and videos processing, either in content feeds or posting campaigns. Today we are glad to introduce one of the latest updates to our Facebook Poster, which improves posting images and videos to Facebook pages and groups.
Before, when you made a post to your Facebook, only one image (photo) was attached to it. ...

The post Improved Photo And Video Posting To Facebook Pages And Groups. appeared first on RSSground.com.

Shelter in place orders (SIPOs) require residents to remain home for all but essential activities such as purchasing food or medicine, caring for others, exercise, or traveling for employment deemed essential. Between March 19 and April 20, 2020, 40 states and the District of Columbia adopted SIPOs. This study explores the impact of SIPOs on health, with particular attention to heterogeneity in their impacts. First, using daily state-level social distancing data from SafeGraph and a difference-in-differences approach, we document that adoption of a SIPO was associated with a 5 to 10 percent increase in the rate at which state residents remained in their homes full-time. Then, using daily state-level coronavirus case data collected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, we find that approximately three weeks following the adoption of a SIPO, cumulative COVID-19 cases fell by 44 percent. Event-study analyses confirm common COVID-19 case trends in the week prior to SIPO adoption and show that SIPO-induced case reductions grew larger over time. However, this average effect masks important heterogeneity across states — early adopters and high population density states appear to reap larger benefits from their SIPOs. Finally, we find that statewide SIPOs were associated with a reduction in coronavirus-related deaths, but estimated mortality effects were imprecisely estimated.

Rugby Football Union chief executive Bill Sweeney has described the prospect of the sport being postponed into 2021 as "catastrophic".

Jenny Murphy believes Irish women's rugby has not developed enough in the time period since the senior team's historic Grand Slam win in 2013.

Freezing soap bubbles look like snow globes. This whimsical effect could help us improve biological freezing techniques—and is incredibly fun to watch.

A study finds that close to a trillion trees could potentially be planted on Earth—enough to sequester more than 200 billion tons of carbon. But environmental change on this scale is no easy task.

Researchers are using fluid dynamics to try to improve the study of crime scene blood spatter.

A new refrigeration technique harnesses the ability of rubber and other materials to cool down when released from a tight twist.

The images confirm the species, which has been “lost” to science for 29 years, is alive and well in its native Vietnam.

Another hit of blurry goodness.
( Photos: 41, Comments: 4 )

Raw, technical trails with surprises around every corner.
( Photos: 22, Comments: 22 )

Fógraíodh tráthnóna go bhfuil 37 duine eile básaithe leis an ngalar Covid-19 sa Stát. Fágann sin go bhfuil 1,375 duine ar fad básaithe leis an ngalar i bPoblacht na hÉireann.

Dúirt Príomh-Oifigeach Leighis na Roinne Sláinte an Dr Tony Holohan cé go bhfuil an líon cásanna den ghalar Covid-19 ag laghdú i dtithe altranais gur údar imní é go bhfuil an líon cásanna i measc an phobail réasúnta seasmhach i gcónaí.

Dhearbhaigh na húdaráis sláinte tráthnóna go bhfuil 29 duine eile básaithe leis an ngalar Covid-19 sa Stát. Fágann sin go bhfuil 1,403 duine ar fad básaithe leis an ngalar i bPoblacht na hÉireann.

Dhearbhaigh na húdaráis sláinte tráthnóna go bhfuil 27 duine eile básaithe leis an ngalar Covid-19 sa Stát. Fágann sin go bhfuil 1,429 duine ar fad básaithe leis an ngalar i bPoblacht na hÉireann.

Ralph Lawler discusses what it's like to see the NBA season suspended, a promising Clippers season put on hold, and the world change while on vacation.

In an attempt to keep the matter under wraps, the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department quietly ordered deputies to delete any photos of the Kobe Bryant helicopter crash scene after a citizen complained that a deputy was showing the gruesome images at a Norwalk bar, two public safety sources with knowledge of the events said.

The Los Angeles Times first reported allegations that deputies were sharing graphic crash photos. Vanessa Bryant's lawyer has asked for an investigation.

A look at what trainers and medical experts think about NBA players returning to games.

Most high schoolers won't get a prom this year. But if school can happen online, so can prom. Send us your photos and let us help.

USC coach Andy Enfield knows the importance of fans' roles in events such as the NCAA tournament, which will be absent this year due to NCAA precaution on the coronavirus.

Former first-round pick Dylan Bundy has battled injuries and declining velocity, but he's no longer in the AL East and the Angels hope his best years are ahead.

Before the coronavirus outbreak, Wrembel visited the Fresh Air studio to talk about his musical influences and to play, with his trio, songs from his new album, Django L'Impressionniste.

The Dayna Stephens trio's improvised grace in a compact setting — where players are interdependent, but no one steps on any toes — sets a good example for life during the pandemic.

Lin-Manuel Miranda, Neil Patrick Harris, Josh Groban and Meryl Streep are just a few of the artists featured in Take Me to the World, a tribute to the iconic Broadway composer and lyricist.

Beanie Feldstein stars in the film adaptation of Caitlin Moran's 2014 semi-autobiographical novel. She says this movie "gives everyone permission to make mistakes."

Outraged that deputies allegedly shared photos from the site of a helicopter crash that killed Kobe Bryant, his daughter and seven others, a California lawmaker wants to make it a crime for law enforcement officers to take unauthorized photographs of those killed in fatal accidents or at crime scenes.

Americans may struggle to decipher Trump's tortured verbs and twisted tenses, but after a monumental crash, an artificial intelligence bot named Margaret proved up to the task.

Lin-Manuel Miranda, Neil Patrick Harris, Josh Groban and Meryl Streep are just a few of the artists featured in Take Me to the World, a tribute to the iconic Broadway composer and lyricist.

Beanie Feldstein stars in the film adaptation of Caitlin Moran's 2014 semi-autobiographical novel. She says this movie "gives everyone permission to make mistakes."