We find 3 new hires for every 10 layoffs caused by the shock and estimate that 42 percent of recent layoffs will result in permanent job loss. That is from a new paper by Jose Maria Barrero, Nick Bloom, and Steven J. Davis, top experts on this and related topics.  As for policy: Unemployment benefit […]

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My viewing habits are less hi-brow than Tyler’s, perhaps especially now when I am seeking escape and mind rest. Here’s a few things I have enjoyed and some that I have not. DEVS on Hulu. If you know what the Everett interpretation is you will probably enjoy this science-fiction drama with big ideas on quantum […]

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The meat supply is starting to fail. Meat processing factories seem especially susceptible to COVID-19 probably because of mist, chilled air circulation, the creation of aerosols and close worker contact. What other industries could be affected? What would happen if the energy, transportation, or pharmaceutical sector failed? We aren’t even sure which industries are critical. […]

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1. Tips for slowing livestock growth due to plant closures. 2. “The Arizona Department of Health Services told a team of university experts working on COVID-19 modeling to “pause” its work, an email from a department leader shows.” 3. Florian Schneider has passed away. 4. Source code for the Imperial College model.  And Sue Denim […]

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That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one bit: The first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic brought serious economic damage for thinly capitalized face-to-face retailers, such as small family-owned restaurants. But many of those same institutions will lead the recovery — that is, if they have built up trust among their […]

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From an email from Paul Foster: From my perch, there are two primary reasons the right doesn’t more passionately oppose child abuse. The first has to do with parents’ rights. The general conservative view of the child welfare system is of a group of liberal ladies who think they know better than parents and who […]

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This paper argues that testing participation –and not testing capacity–is the biggest obstacle to a successful “test and isolate”-strategy, as recently proposed by Paul Romer. If ????0=2.5,at least 60percentof a population needs to participate in a testing program to make it theoretically possible to achieve an effective reproduction rate for the whole population,????'', below 1. […]

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Workers in the bottom quintile of the wage distribution experienced a 35 percent employment decline while those in the top quintile experienced only a 9 percent decline. Large differences across the wage distribution persist even after conditioning on worker age, business industry, business size, and worker location. As a result, average base wages increased by […]

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