With the wave of coronavirus infections washing over Europe, countries have turned inward to protect themselves. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has struggled to define the EU's role in the crisis as border checks have been reintroduced across the Continent.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

China is the largest creditor in the world, funding infrastructure projects in the developing world in exchange for access to raw materials. A new study shows that the risk of a new debt crisis is significant.

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.

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.

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.

Early May weather finally brought spring relief to my family weary from weeks of dreary weather and sheltering in place. Inexplicably a dance party had broken out; the boys, giddy from the arrival of two rabbits — pandemic pets — were dancing with their grandmother as my wife and I looked on, sipping evening cocktails. Then an absentminded Twitter check confronted me with the shocking video of Ahmaud Arbery, a young black Georgian, being hunted down and killed by two white men.

Add Dr. Rick Bright to the list of coronavirus whistleblowers silenced or sidelined for trying to push truth over politics as we battle this deadly scourge. He was just ousted from his post as director of the HHS agency working on a COVID-19 vaccine for what he claims was his refusal to support a “game-changing” supposed cure President Trump and friends have been touting. CDC chief Robert Redfield suffered a similar rebuke for warning of a second wave of the virus next winter, contradicting the more rosy picture the president wants trying to paint. Not fired (yet), but clearly pressured to toe the line, truth and science be damned.

He is preparing for the 2020 NBA Draft in a year where basketball is no longer the same.

Emergency department visits are costly to providers and to patients. We use the Flint water crisis to test if an increase in office visits reduced avoidable emergency room visits. In September 2015, the city of Flint issued a lead advisory to its residents, alerting them of increased lead levels in their drinking water, resulting from the switch in water source from Lake Huron to the Flint River. Using Medicaid claims for 2013-2016, we find that this information shock increased the share of enrollees who had lead tests performed by 1.7 percentage points. Additionally, it increased office visits immediately following the information shock and led to a reduction of 4.9 preventable, non-emergent, and primary-care-treatable emergency room visits per 1000 eligible children (8.2%). This decrease is present in shifts from emergency room visits to office visits across several common conditions. Our analysis suggest that children were more likely to receive care from the same clinic following lead tests and that establishing care reduced the likelihood parents would take their children to emergency rooms for conditions treatable in an office setting. Our results are potentially applicable to any situation in which individuals are induced to seek more care in an office visit setting.

Lysacek, originally from Naperville, took a loss on the two-bedroom condo.

A redevelopment deal has been reached for the former Ford Motor Co. plant in St. Paul that would feature thousands of new homes powered by renewable energy, officials announced Tuesday.

Ruby Walsh believes enforcing social distancing should not prove too much of an issue when racing eventually resumes.

Kyle Walker claims he is being "harassed" after admitting that he breached lockdown rules to visit his sister and parents.

We model optimal e-cigarette regulation and estimate key sufficient statistics. Using tax changes and scanner data, we estimate relatively elastic demand and limited substitution between e-cigarettes and combustible cigarettes. In sample surveys, historical smoking declines for high- and low-vaping demographics were unchanged after e-cigarettes were introduced; this demographic shift-share identification also suggests limited substitution. We field a new survey of experts, who report that vaping is almost as harmful as smoking cigarettes. In our model, these results imply that current e-cigarette taxes are far below the social optimum, but Monte Carlo simulations highlight substantial uncertainty.

Instead of waking up to wish his daughter the best on her 23rd birthday, Collin Dixon got the phone call every parent dreads.

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.

The defendants were linked in a 15-page Manhattan court filing with a cornucopia of crimes committed between 2010-19, from murder to robbery, wire fraud to kidnapping, and drug dealing to identity theft.

The last suspect in the grisly gang-related Brooklyn murders of two men whose bodies were burned after they were tortured and killed pleaded guilty Friday.

Mervyn Affoon, who taught at the Academy of Hospitality and Tourism at hospitality at Erasmus Hall High School in Flatbush, is accused of sexually abusing the teen about 15 times between March 2017 and June 2017.

Friends played touch football and shared sweaty exercise equipment while others kept their distance from others

While an increasing number of criminal suspects are being arraigned by video to prevent the spread of coronavirus, defendants’ families often sit on crowded courthouse benches waiting for their relatives’ arraignments.

Wilfredo Cervantes, 52, an artist and poet from Puerto Rico, was found dead inside his second-floor apartment on Jefferson Ave. near Ralph Ave. in Bedford-Stuyvesant on Wednesday evening.

An 83-year-old man was punched and had a gun put to his head by two masked men in Brooklyn, according to video released by police.

The COVID-19 deaths included 22 paraprofessionals, 21 teachers, two administrators, two central office staffers, a facilities employee, a guidance counselor and a school food worker.

Twenty-two of the city’s 25,000 paraprofessionals have died from the coronavirus, a rate four times higher than the rest of the 150,000-employee Department of Education, according to the agency’s data.

Since its launch in 2009, Repeat Signage digital signage software is now in daily use in 31 countries across a wide variety of applications and vertical markets. A big thank you to all our customers and reseller partners.

A suspect accused in the shooting of Ahmaud Arbery, an unarmed black jogger killed in a Georgia suburrb more than two months ago, was involved in a previous prosecution of the 26-year-old runner back when he worked for the local district attorney’s office.

The governor did not go as far as to cancel rent outright, which progressives have increasingly called on him to do as the virus continues to curtail people’s ability to work and make ends meet.

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

My retirement came at the very start of the season so it felt like things had dragged on for quite a while for me before I could attempt to cut ties because I had already kicked off the season with the current group.

An incense burner from a century tested positive for a chemical that’s released when THC is burned.

Urban infants who spend their first year of life around microbes like those found on farms are less likely to develop asthma.

Wolves lack the facial muscles required to raise their eyebrows—a feature that makes dogs especially endearing to people.

A new study reveals that some European Neanderthals might have displaced their relatives in Siberia, while others mingled with another, still mysterious, ancient human population.

How “change blindness” prevents you from seeing this 10 of clubs turn into an ace of spades.

A new analysis of a skull found in Greece decades ago suggests that early humans may have been in Eurasia as early as 210,000 years ago.