Best Selling Books by David Byrne

Ultra-marathons are not the preserve of the fitness elite - with hard work and solid training ordinary people can take part. At first 100k and 5000m ascent/descent may seem intimidating but, as experience grows, this turns in to an achievable adventure in the Alps. Starting with the flagship UTMB ''Courmayeur Champex Chamonix'' (CCC) race this book traces a journey across Europe ending back in Chamonix with the ''Sur les Traces des Ducs de Savoie'' (TDS)''. The races on this journey include UTMR, Ut4M, Transylvania 50 and 80, South de France 100, Arctic Ultra, Lakeland 100 and Ecotrail events in Oslo and Paris. Each event is covered in detail so you know what to expect should you decide to enter.Written from the back half of the pack, the steps to success are unpicked and laid out (including how to deal with a ''Did Not Finish'') showing what is possible with planning, training, self-belief and a touch of luck.Come with me on a journey in to the night.

This paper addresses two measurement issues for mobile phones. First, we develop a new mobile phone price index using hedonic quality-adjusted prices for smartphones and a matched-model index for feature phones. Our index falls at an average annual rate of 17 percent during 2010-2018, close to the rate of decline in the price index used in the GDP Accounts. Given relatively flat average prices over this period, our index points to substantial quality improvement. Second, we propose a methodology to disentangle purchases of phones and wireless services when they are bundled together as part of a long-term service contract. Getting the allocation right is especially important for real PCE because the price deflators for phones and wireless services exhibit very different trends. Our adjusted estimates suggest that real PCE spending currently captured in the category Cellular Phone Services increased 4 percentage points faster than is reflected in published data.

The International Labour Organisation (ILO) argues for relaxing the standard definition of unemployment in developing countries where labour markets are not as efficient as those in the developed world. We examine whether such an extension of the standard definition is appropriate in the case of Trinidad and Tobago. Specifically, we use individual behaviour to classify persons into labour market states, rather than a priori criteria like job search. The Trinidad and Tobago Continuous Survey Sample of Population provides data uniquely suited to this purpose. Our results indicate that in Trinidad and Tobago males, who under the standard criteria would be considered out of the labour force because they report willingness to work but are not currently searching for a job, are appropriately classified as unemployed. Further evidence suggests that this may be because job search may not be as meaningful in rural as it is in urban areas.

The funding mix of European firms is weighted heavily towards bank credit, which underscores the importance of efficient pass-through of monetary policy actions to lending rates faced by firms. Euro area pass-through has shifted from being relatively homogenous to being fragmented and incomplete since the financial crisis. Distressed loan books are a crisis hangover with direct implications for profitability, hampering banks ability to supply credit and lower loan pricing in response to reductions in the policy rate. This paper presents a parsimonious model to decompose the cost of lending and highlight the role of asset quality in diminishing pass-through. Using bank-level data over the period 2008-2014, we empirically test the implications of the model. We show that a one percentage point increase in the impairment ratio lowering short run pass-through by 3 percent. We find that banks with severely impaired balance sheets do not adjust their loan pricing in response to changes in the policy rate at all. We derive a measure of the hidden bad loan problem, the NPL gap, which we define as the excess of non-performing loans over impaired loans. We show that it played a significant role in the fragmentation of euro area pass-through post-crisis.

This paper develops a framework for measuring digital services in the face of ongoing innovations in the delivery of content to consumers. We capture what Brynjolfsson and Saunders (2009) call "free goods" as the capital services generated by connected consumers'' stocks of IT digital goods, a service flow that augments the existing measure of personal consumption in GDP. Its value is determined by the intensity with which households use their IT capital to consume content delivered over networks, and its volume depends on the quality of the IT capital. Consumers pay for delivery services, however, and the complementarity between device use and network use enables us to develop a quality-adjusted price measure for the access services already included in GDP. Our new estimates imply that accounting for innovations in consumer content delivery matters: The innovations boost consumer surplus by nearly $1,800 (2017 dollars) per connected user per year for the full period of this study (1987 to 2017) and contribute more than 1/2 percentage point to US real GDP growth during the last ten. All told, our more complete accounting of innovations is (conservatively) estimated to have moderated the post-2007 GDP growth slowdown by nearly .3 percentage points per year.

(Cont.) The synthetic scheme was also utilized to produce a monomer that could be electrochemically cross-linked in a controlled fashion. In chapter four, a variety of polythiophene derivatives that incorporated azaferrocenes complexes into the main polymer chain were synthesized. These polymers were then used to ascertain the effect of a n-bound metal on the main chain of a conducting polymer. The oxidation of the metal centers in the polymer produced a significant change in the conductivity of the polymer film. Changing the length and oxidation potential of the polythiophene section of the monomer appeared to alter the charge delocalization of the polymers. In chapter five, a series of polythiophene derivatives containing cyclobutadiene cobalt cyclopentadiene complexes in the main polymer chain were synthesized. The viability of the electropolymerization of the complexes was determined by the relative position of organic section''s oxidation potential versus the oxidation of the metal centers. The metal coordinated cyclobutadiene ring of the complex appeared to have a modest charge transport ability.

Are you a democrat? Do you love the freedoms that are granted to you that people all over the world can only dream of having? Well then you should hate referendums! Forget everything you''ve been told about them. Brexit was not the ''Biggest Democratic Exercise'' in the history of the UK. Nor does it have to be a ''Once in a generation'' vote. You''re not taking power out of the hands of politicians - you''re simply doing their bidding. You may think that by voting in referendums you are making history, but the only history you are making is providing yet another example in a long list of why referendums are a bad idea.

This paper studies price and quality differences across international intermediate input suppliers. We develop price measures that account for (i) differences in product characteristics, (ii) unobserved quality differences, and (iii) pure (frictional) price dispersion across suppliers. Using uniquely detailed transaction- level data from the semiconductor industry, we document large average price differences across suppliers for observationally identical products, and find that price differentials close over the product life cycle. We interpret this finding in a model where buyers face costs of switching suppliers. The theory demonstrates how to use the observed price dynamics to adjust prices for unobserved quality differences across suppliers. The results of this analysis reveal that pure price dispersion and unobserved quality differences are both important in this market. These two features make it difficult to construct constant-quality import price indexes, which generally assume away pure price dispersion. We document the resulting upward bias in standard price indexes, develop a quality-adjusted index for semiconductor fabrication, and propose a general method for bounding the true constant-quality price index.

Since the early 1980s, renowned musician and visual artist David Byrne has been riding a bike as his principal means of transportation in New York City. Two decades ago, he discovered folding bikes and started taking them with him when traveling around the world. Bicycle Diaries chronicles Byrne''s observations and insights--what he is seeing, whom he is meeting, what he is thinking about--as he pedals through and engages with some of the world''s major cities.