Drägerwerk is a world leader in the production of ventilators. In an interview, company head Stefan Dräger, 57, discusses the challenges of keeping up with current demand as the corona crisis accelerates.

The fight against the coronavirus has paralyzed society and the economy. Lockdown measures are fine for the short term, but they threaten to rapidly destroy the economy and erode our existing social order. What should the next steps be?

Some in Germany have the impression that the country can survive a long-term lockdown without suffering any grave consequences. That thinking is dangerous.

German politicians have begun calling for industry to be shielded from too much environmental protection during the coronavirus crisis. But corporations aren't joining the appeal. They managed to turn CO2 reduction into a competitive advantage long ago.

Definition: (verb) Restore to a previous or better condition.
Synonyms: restitute.
Usage: This old farmhouse may look ramshackle now, but it will be the epitome of rustic charm once I renovate it.

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.

The European Commission is limited in what it can do to combat the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, but this only makes it more imperative for Brussels to set the correct priorities.

In Spain, the number of coronavirus deaths is climbing faster than in Italy. Dr. Inés Lipperheide is fighting to save her patients in an overcrowded intensive care unit. She reports conditions straight out of a "horror film."

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

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.

Well-off Brazilians have brought the coronavirus back home with them from their travels. Many of them also employ domestic workers from the country's favelas - who they're apparently unwilling to protect by telling them to stay home. Brazil's poorest class could make easy quarry for the disease.

In the fight against COVID-19, doctors and health workers are testing drugs and treatments whose efficacy has been proven against other illnesses. We take a look at the most prominent ones and the early findings.

In an interview with DER SPIEGEL, German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas, 53, criticizes the U.S., China and Hungary for their handling of the coronavirus pandemic. He also promises not to abandon Italy and explains why he doesn't want to say that he's actually in favor of corona bonds.

Donald Trump’s disastrous crisis management has made the United States the new epicenter of the global coronavirus pandemic. The country is facing an unprecedented economic crash. Are we witnessing the implosion of a superpower? By DER SPIEGEL Staff

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.

Brendan Leipsic talked his way out of a job.

Levine is making the rounds to make the case for baseball in the time of the coronavirus pandemic.

Joe Castiglione saw his first baseball game in the Bronx.

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.

This paper proposes a new methodology for estimating teacher value-added. Rather than imposing a normality assumption on unobserved teacher quality (as in the standard empirical Bayes approach), our nonparametric estimator permits the underlying distribution to be estimated directly and in a computationally feasible way. The resulting estimates fit the unobserved distribution very well regardless of the form it takes, as we show in Monte Carlo simulations. Implementing the nonparametric approach in practice using two separate large-scale administrative data sets, we find the estimated teacher value-added distributions depart from normality and differ from each other. To draw out the policy implications of our method, we first consider a widely-discussed policy to release teachers at the bottom of the value-added distribution, comparing predicted test score gains under our nonparametric approach with those using parametric empirical Bayes. Here the parametric method predicts similar policy gains in one data set while overestimating those in the other by a substantial margin. We also show the predicted gains from teacher retention policies can be underestimated significantly based on the parametric method. In general, the results highlight the benefit of our nonparametric empirical Bayes approach, given that the unobserved distribution of value-added is likely to be context-specific.

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.

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.

Public schooling systems are an essential feature of modern states. These systems often developed at the expense of religious schools, which undertook the bulk of education historically and still cater to large student populations worldwide. This paper examines how Indonesia’s long-standing Islamic school system responded to the construction of 61,000 public elementary schools in the mid-1970s. The policy was designed in part to foster nation building and to curb religious influence in society. We are the first to study the market response to these ideological objectives. Using novel data on Islamic school construction and curriculum, we identify both short-run effects on exposed cohorts as well as dynamic, long-run effects on education markets. While primary enrollment shifted towards state schools, religious education increased on net as Islamic secondary schools absorbed the increased demand for continued education. The Islamic sector not only entered new markets to compete with the state but also increased religious curriculum at newly created schools. Our results suggest that the Islamic sector response increased religiosity at the expense of a secular national identity. Overall, this ideological competition in education undermined the nation-building impacts of mass 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.

In an interview, Arne Schönbohm, 49, the head of Germany's Federal Office for Information Security, discusses the potential danger posed by Huawei, why he thinks it is "manageable" and the general state of IT threats in Germany.

Scientists believe designer viruses created in the laboratory can help the agricultural industry deal with pathogens and extreme weather. A vast experiment is currently being planned. But can the viruses be controlled?

Pressure is growing across the board for large corporations to do more to protect the environment and the climate. Even institutional investors like Blackrock head Larry Fink are joining the chorus of voices calling for change.

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.

The coronavirus pandemic has inflicted massive damage on the aviation industry. But Lufthansa CEO Carsten Spohr says that the German flag carrier is in a good position to survive, even if it will take several years for the industry to recover.