On Thursday, European leaders will discuss how to navigate the block through the economic crisis triggered by the novel coronavirus. In a DER SPIEGEL interview, European Commissioner Paolo Gentiloni talks about what is at stake and the need to find at least 1 trillion euros.

Twelve weeks after the outbreak of the coronavirus epidemic in China, leaders in Beijing are gradually reopening the country. But how can they be sure their decision won't backfire?

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.

Dominican Yankees and Mets stars are working with Pedro Martinez to respond to the coronavirus pandemic in their homeland.

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.

Innovation policy involves trading off monopoly output and pricing in the short run in exchange for incentives for firms to develop new products in the future. While existing research demonstrates that expected profits fuel R&D investments, little is known about the novelty of the projects funded by these investments. Relying on data that describe the scientific approaches used by a large sample of experimental drug projects, we expand on this literature by examining the scientific novelty of pharmaceutical R&D investments following the creation of the Medicare Part D program. We find little evidence that the positive demand shock implied by this program prompted firms to undertake scientifically novel R&D activity, as measured by whether the specific scientific approach had been used before. However, we find some evidence that firms invested in products involving novel combinations of scientific approaches. These estimates can inform economists and policymakers assessing the tradeoffs associated with marginal changes in commercial returns from newly developed pharmaceutical products.

We use longitudinal data from the income tax system to study the impacts of firms’ employment and wage-setting policies on the level and change in immigrant-native wage differences in Canada. We focus on immigrants who arrived in the early 2000s, distinguishing between those with and without a college degree from two broad groups of countries – the U.S., the U.K. and Northern Europe, and the rest of the world. Consistent with a growing literature based on the two-way fixed effects model of Abowd, Kramarz, and Margolis (1999), we find that firm-specific wage premiums explain a significant share of earnings inequality in Canada and contribute to the average earnings gap between immigrants and natives. In the decade after receiving permanent status, earnings of immigrants rise relative to those of natives. Compositional effects due to selective outmigration and changing participation play no role in this gain. About one-sixth is attributable to movements up the job ladder to employers that offer higher pay premiums for all groups, with particularly large gains for immigrants from the “rest of the world” countries.

We explore whether minimum wage increases result in substitution from lower-skilled to slightly higher-skilled labor. Using 2011-2016 American Community Survey data (ACS), we show that workers employed in low-wage occupations are older and more likely to have a high school diploma following recent statutory minimum wage increases. To better understand the role of firms, we examine the Burning Glass vacancy data. We find increases in a high school diploma requirement following minimum wage hikes, consistent with our ACS evidence on stocks of employed workers. We see substantial adjustments to requirements both within and across firms.

Recent research has highlighted unequal treatment for women in academic economics along several different dimensions, including promotion, hiring, credit for co-authorship, and standards for publication in professional journals. Can the source of these differences lie in biases against women that are pervasive in the discipline, even among students in the earliest stages of their training? In this paper, we provide evidence on the importance of explicit and implicit biases against women among students in economics relative to other fields. We conducted a large scale survey among undergraduate students in Chilean universities, among both entering first-year students and students in years 2 and above. On a wide battery of measures, economics students are more biased than students in other fields. Economics students are somewhat more biased already upon entry, before exposure to any economics classes. The gap is more pronounced among students in years 2 and above, in particular for male students. We also find an increase in bias in a sample of students that we follow longitudinally. Differences in political ideology explain essentially all the gap at entry, but none of the increase in the gap with exposure. Exposure to female students and faculty attenuates some of the bias.

Clouds are gathering on the horizon of the global economy and the risk of a recession is growing. Many experts believe that the international banking system is unprepared and Germany has begun getting ready for the worst.

Economist Nouriel Roubini correctly predicted the 2008 financial crisis. Now, he believes that stock markets will plunge by 30 to 40 percent because of the coronavirus. And that Trump will lose his re-election bid.

Am I required to work if I can't find alternative childcare with daycare centers now closed? Will I still get my salary? What happens to my health insurance? Answers to the most pressing questions about labor law in times of the coronavirus.

It is an unprecedented crisis: The coronavirus pandemic is crippling entire economies, while governments and central banks are deploying all means available to prevent a systemic collapse. How long can we hold out?

The coronavirus crisis has forced another 3.2 million Americans to file for jobless aid, bringing the total number to 33.5 million in the seven weeks since the pandemic forced millions of companies to close and layoff huge amounts of staff.

Weather extreme enough to shatter records across large swaths of the U.S. is heading our way this weekend, just in time for Mother’s Day. A storm system heading into the Northeast on Friday will smash into the polar vortex as it makes swing down from the Arctic, reported NBC News. This might sock the region in with heavy, wet snow all the way into New England.

Former NFL star Brett Favre said Wednesday he would repay the state of Mississippi $1.1 million after a state auditor discovered the Mississippi Department of Human Services paid the ex-quarterback for speaking engagements that never happened.

They don’t want people bugging out.

An already-unlikely motive in the Ahmaud Arbery murder case became even more suspicious on Friday. The two Georgia men who were caught on video shooting the unarmed jogger to death in February claim they were chasing a suspect behind a series of burglaries in the area. But a local police official said the last break-in the neighborhood was reported nearly two months before the shooting.

A week packed with US economic data is likely to provide investors with more evidence of the extent to which the coronavirus pandemic has hit growth, sharpening the debate on whether a rebound in stocks has been justified amid an unprecedented slowdown.

The Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (CCPC) has simplified the system for certain mergers to be notified to it.

The Government is to provide a State guaranteed refund credit note for package holidays booked through Irish travel agents and tour operators in effort to help the industry during Covid-19 crisis.

The Minister for Finance has said the State can afford to continue to fund the measures put in place by the Government to deal with the fallout from the Covid-19 pandemic.

The US economy lost a staggering 20.5 million jobs in April, the steepest plunge in payrolls since the Great Depression and the starkest sign yet of how the coronavirus pandemic is battering the world's biggest economy.

We show that trade credit in production networks is important for the transmission of unconventional monetary policy. We find that firms with bonds eligible for purchase under the European Central Bank’s Corporate Sector Purchase Program act as financial intermediaries and extend more trade credit to their customers. The increase in trade credit flows is more pronounced from core countries to periphery countries and towards financially constrained customers. Customers increase investment and employment in response to the additional financing, while suppliers with eligible bonds increase their customer base, potentially favoring upstream industry concentration. Our findings suggest that the trade credit channel of monetary policy produces heterogeneous effects on regions, industries, and firms.

The patient, laid up in the ICU, gets sicker. Thursday, 3.2 million more people joined the ranks of the unemployed, bringing to 33.5 million the number of Americans who’ve lost jobs since mid-March. Believe it: One in five of those employed before this living, dying hell began is now seeking jobless benefits.

With increasing reports of large public companies and politically connected ones receiving COVID-19 rescue aid and the Trump administration blocking proper oversight, business leaders can act on their own to protect the integrity of the government aid effort and of companies themselves. They can do that by disclosing their companies’ political spending to show that political influence is not a factor in who gets help.

As much as Mayor de Blasio wants to pretend these arrests are just a drop in the bucket, from the point of view of those being constantly dropped in the bucket, the city’s heavy-handed coronavirus crackdown is just more of the same.Same profiling. Same brutality. Same disrespect.

Last Feb. 14, Gov. Cuomo signed the Child Victims Act into law. He did it in the newsroom of the Daily News, because it was this paper that, over many years, spotlighted the wrenching cases of people abused as children, perversely prevented from seeking justice as adults.