we

Corona-Maßnahmen: Tausende Menschen demonstrieren bundesweit gegen Einschränkungen

"Stoppt Gates", "Legt den Maulkorb ab", "Widerstand": In mehreren deutschen Städten haben Bürger gegen die Corona-Beschränkungen protestiert. Auf Abstandsregeln nahmen nicht alle Rücksicht.




we

Corona: Germany Weighing Strict Curfews If Rules Violated over Weekend

The head of Angela Merkel’s Chancellery has warned that people’s behavior this weekend will be pivotal in determining whether strict shelter-in-place curfews are imposed in Germany to control the spread of the coronavirus.




we

Politicians Call for Fewer Climate Protections During Coronavirus Crisis

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.




we

Corona Crisis: We Should Be Adopting Stricter Measures, Not Loosening the Lockdown

People are growing increasingly impatient over the coronavirus lockdown, and politicians are now debating whether to loosen measures. From a scientific point of view this is a disaster. Measures should actually be tightened until we know more about the virus.




we

Health vs. Wealth? Public Health Policies and the Economy During Covid-19 -- by Zhixian Lin, Christopher M. Meissner

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.




we

Generosity Across the Income and Wealth Distributions -- by Jonathan Meer, Benjamin A. Priday

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

I dressed and went for a walk -- determined not to return until I took in what Nature had to offer.

Raymond Carver, writer, poet




we

Md. Gov. Hogan vetoes sweeping education legislation

 -More




we

Changes in Black-White Inequality: Evidence from the Boll Weevil -- by Karen Clay, Ethan J. Schmick, Werner Troesken

This paper investigates the effect of a large negative agricultural shock, the boll weevil, on black-white inequality in the first half of the twentieth century. To do this we use complete count census data to generate a linked sample of fathers and their sons. We find that the boll weevil induced enormous labor market and social disruption as more than half of black and white fathers moved to other counties following the arrival of the weevil. The shock impacted black and white sons differently. We compare sons whose fathers initially resided in the same county and find that white sons born after the boll weevil had similar wages and schooling outcomes to white sons born prior to its arrival. In contrast, black sons born after the boll weevil had significantly higher wages and years of schooling, narrowing the black-white wage and schooling gaps. This decrease appears to have been driven by relative improvements in early life conditions and access to schooling both for sons of black fathers that migrated out of the South and sons of black fathers that stayed in the South.




we

Team Players: How Social Skills Improve Group Performance -- by Ben Weidmann, David J. Deming

Most jobs require teamwork. Are some people good team players? In this paper we design and test a new method for identifying individual contributions to group performance. We randomly assign people to multiple teams and predict team performance based on previously assessed individual skills. Some people consistently cause their group to exceed its predicted performance. We call these individuals “team players”. Team players score significantly higher on a well-established measure of social intelligence, but do not differ across a variety of other dimensions, including IQ, personality, education and gender. Social skills – defined as a single latent factor that combines social intelligence scores with the team player effect – improve group performance about as much as IQ. We find suggestive evidence that team players increase effort among teammates.




we

German Cybersecurity Chief: Threats Posed by Huawei Are Manageable

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.




we

The Human Microchipping Trend Sweeping Sweden

Employees at the Swedish unit of the German travel conglomerate TUI are volunteering to have a microchip implanted in their hands. The technology literally opens doors, but also raises numerous ethical questions.




we

"As a Chinese Company, We Never Get the Benefit of the Doubt"

In an interview, Alex Zhu, the head of the Chinese video app TikTok, defends the company against accusations of spying and censorship and explains why he isn't interested in making the platform a place for political debate.




we

Hear the news of the week with The Tribune Friday morning on KCPW’s Behind the Headlines




we

Blood, sweat and swabs: UFC seeks safe shows in pandemic




we

David Brooks: We need national service. Now.




we

Live coronavirus updates for Friday, May 8: West Jordan canceling the Western Stampede rodeo due to COVID-19 concerns




we

Jean Norman: Why we can’t call them Generation Z anymore




we

Bagley Cartoon: Well-run State




we

Daryl Austin: If our recent trip to Hogle Zoo is the future, we’re going to be OK




we

Letter: Bad things happen when we aren’t looking




we

Letter: Why we need a nosy press




we

Former Bad Company lead singer Brian Howe dead at 66

Singer and songwriter Brian Howe, a former lead vocalist for the British rock band Bad Company, died Wednesday after suffering a cardiac arrest at his home in Florida. The 66-year-old English musician had a brief conversation with first responders, but he then “slipped away" and could not be revived, longtime friend and manager Paul Easton said Thursday.




we

Unheard-of May snow, icy cold temps, and high winds blasting in for Mother’s Day weekend

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.




we

SEE IT: Red tide by day showers shoreline in mystical light by night off Southern California

Californians venturing onto the beach after a month of lockdown are being greeted with the ethereal sight of bioluminescent waves from an algae bloom.




we

4th family member charged in murder of Family Dollar security guard who asked customer to wear mask

Brya Bishop was arrested days before her 25th birthday and charged with three felonies.




we

Southwest Airlines plane hits and kills person as it lands on Texas runway

A Southwest jet traveling from Dallas fatally struck a person as it touched down at a Texas airport Thursday night, authorities said.




we

No burglaries were reported in neighborhood where Ahmaud Arbery was killed, contradicting suspects’ claim: report

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.




we

Costco shoppers upset the retailer is requiring customers to wear face masks during a pandemic

Some Costco customers are not happy about having to wear masks in stores.




we

US data to underscore divide between market and economy

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.




we

Covid-19 impacting 'well-being and relationships'

The Covid-19 outbreak is having a negative impact on personal relationships and well-being, while it has also led to an increase in the consumption of alcohol.




we

Bring on the e-scooters: A Bird executive explains how New York City can smartly and safely welcome the micromobility devices

Electric scooters are coming to New York and, with a little planning and preparation, they can safely thrive here. To understand how, it helps to start with some context.




we

We could use a few more Good Samaritans

“The Parable of the Good Samaritan is about a Jewish man unexpectedly receiving help from a despised enemy with whom he had serious religious differences.”




we

GREENE: Same profiling, same brutality, same disrespect — social distancing enforcement shows NYC ‘not as far as we think we are’

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.




we

Distance learning: Social-distance policing is racially skewed; how to fix it

Seen plenty of people on sidewalks or in parks gallivanting without masks and clustering less than six feet apart? Of course you have, no matter the racial, religious or ethnic composition of the neighborhood; it’s happening everywhere, especially on nice days.




we

Ex-NBA player Shannon Brown arrested for shooting at people he thought were breaking into his home

Former NBA guard Shannon Brown was arrested recently after shooting a rifle in a mixup at his home.




we

Iconic Las Vegas wedding chapel is no longer up for sale

The owner of a Las Vegas chapel where celebrity couples like Joe Jonas and Sophie Turner have gotten married is staying wedded to her business.




we

Grove Resort and Water Park completes 3rd tower in 878-room complex

The Grove Resort and Water Park fishes three-year journey to complete three-building complex's construction.




we

From this luxury tower, you’ll see horses cross the finish line

The developer of a 23-story tower near Gulfstream Park in Hallandale Beach envisions a project with 320 condo style rentals and a 140-room hotel.




we

Ousted WeWork co-founder Adam Neumann selling Manhattan penthouse for $37.5 million

Billionaire Adam Neumann, who was ousted from WeWork after the company’s botched attempt to go public last year, is selling a swanky penthouse in Manhattan’s Gramercy Park neighborhood for $37.5 million. The 41-year-old Israeli entrepreneur, whose unorthodox management style made shocking headlines in recent months, reportedly combined a four-bedroom penthouse and a three-bedroom apartment that he bought in 2017 into a massive three-story unit.




we

Sober homes face challenge of finding welcoming neighborhood

As important as sober homes are to the effort to address a statewide crisis at the local level, many neighborhoods prefer not to be a part of that mission.




we

‘Be prepared for the Wild West’: As real estate’s busy season winds up, here’s how to buy or sell a home during the coronavirus pandemic

Real estate data suggests the market took a downturn in March that might already be rebounding. Here's what experts predict.




we

A Multi-Risk SIR Model with Optimally Targeted Lockdown -- by Daron Acemoglu, Victor Chernozhukov, Iván Werning, Michael D. Whinston

We develop a multi-risk SIR model (MR-SIR) where infection, hospitalization and fatality rates vary between groups—in particular between the “young”, “the middle-aged” and the “old”. Our MR-SIR model enables a tractable quantitative analysis of optimal policy similar to those already developed in the context of the homogeneous-agent SIR models. For baseline parameter values for the COVID-19 pandemic applied to the US, we find that optimal policies differentially targeting risk/age groups significantly outperform optimal uniform policies and most of the gains can be realized by having stricter lockdown policies on the oldest group. For example, for the same economic cost (24.3% decline in GDP), optimal semi–targeted or fully-targeted policies reduce mortality from 1.83% to 0.71% (thus, saving 2.7 million lives) relative to optimal uniform policies. Intuitively, a strict and long lockdown for the most vulnerable group both reduces infections and enables less strict lockdowns for the lower-risk groups. We also study the impacts of social distancing, the matching technology, the expected arrival time of a vaccine, and testing with or without tracing on optimal policies. Overall, targeted policies that are combined with measures that reduce interactions between groups and increase testing and isolation of the infected can minimize both economic losses and deaths in our model.




we

Inequality of Fear and Self-Quarantine: Is There a Trade-off between GDP and Public Health? -- by Sangmin Aum, Sang Yoon (Tim) Lee, Yongseok Shin

We construct a quantitative model of an economy hit by an epidemic. People differ by age and skill, and choose occupations and whether to commute to work or work from home, to maximize their income and minimize their fear of infection. Occupations differ by wage, infection risk, and the productivity loss when working from home. By setting the model parameters to replicate the progression of COVID-19 in South Korea and the United Kingdom, we obtain three key results. First, government-imposed lock-downs may not present a clear trade-off between GDP and public health, as commonly believed, even though its immediate effect is to reduce GDP and infections by forcing people to work from home. A premature lifting of the lock-down raises GDP temporarily, but infections rise over the next months to a level at which many people choose to work from home, where they are less productive, driven by the fear of infection. A longer lock-down eventually mitigates the GDP loss as well as flattens the infection curve. Second, if the UK had adopted South Korean policies, its GDP loss and infections would have been substantially smaller both in the short and the long run. This is not because Korea implemented policies sooner, but because aggressive testing and tracking more effectively reduce infections and disrupt the economy less than a blanket lock-down. Finally, low-skill workers and self-employed lose the most from the epidemic and also from the government policies. However, the policy of issuing “visas” to those who have antibodies will disproportionately benefit the low-skilled, by relieving them of the fear of infection and also by allowing them to get back to work.




we

Which Workers Bear the Burden of Social Distancing Policies? -- by Simon Mongey, Laura Pilossoph, Alex Weinberg

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.




we

Brooklyn assault suspects get welcome reprieve under new reforms: No bail despite alleged violent offenses in separate cases

Two men accused of violent crimes were freed without bail from Brooklyn Criminal Court on Thursday amid growing concern about the state's new bail reform laws.




we

After legendary 53-year career, Brooklyn Federal Judge Jack Weinstein hangs up his robe at age 98

Judge Jack Weinstein on Monday moved to inactive status, closing out a 53-year career. A highlight of his law career was working with Thurgood Marshall on the legal arguments that led the U.S. Supreme Court to rule in Brown v. Board of Education that school segregation was illegal. He was named a federal judge in 1967, and on his retirement was the last appointee of President Lyndon Johnson still on the bench.




we

SEE IT: Crook wears N95 face mask to rob deli of cash and 36 Red Bulls

A pair of crooks smashed their way into a grocery store in Brooklyn and stole the deli’s cash register along with three dozen Red Bulls, cops said.




we

Fewer than 8,000 NYC kids in foster care, an all-time low: officials

The results from the city’s annual foster care census showed a precipitous decline from the 1990s, when there were 50,000 kids in foster care, and a continued improvement from 2010, when there were 17,000.




we

NYC lawyers push back on state proposal to lower qualifications for special education judges amid shortage

New York City currently has fewer than 70 special education judges — called impartial hearing officers — to handle the thousands of complaints that special education students lodge every year against the city school system, resulting in more than 10,000 still-open cases.