🚨New working paper alert🚨
The first paper out of a year-long project I've been working on using leaked offshore bank data
Curious about who uses tax havens and how shell companies distort international statistics? Interested in corruption?
Thread 👇
Little known fact that Prigozhin only chose to u-turn 200km out from Moscow after he read Agnes Callard's "The Case Against Travel" in the New Yorker and realized that he was too wrapped up in the idea of a "genuine experience"
Economists: we need to be most honest about the limitations of our work
You: Great! Here are the limitations of my paper
Referees: thanks for being honest! We're rejecting your paper because of its limitations
OK, some thoughts about that paper that everyone is talking about
Disclaimers:
* I'm friends with Bob Rijkers & big fans of his & Niels Johannesen's work
I think:
*tax havens are bad
* some % of all types of aid is probably captured
* it is bad the paper was blocked
People: economics is too obsessed with empirics and causality
Same people: I am completely convinced by this N=40 cross country regression claiming that the World Bank causally causes locusts swarms
The best place to relax is near water.
After just 2 minutes of viewing water outdoors, blood pressure and heart rate drop. It's more calming to look at a lake, pool, or stream than trees or grass.
Beaches are popular for a reason. Wider bodies of water bring more tranquility.
Wow - EAs don't get to take credit for this - international development + dev econ folks were all talking about this long before you showed up folks
If anything, the causality is reversed, the toolset got refined and the EA movement picked it up and ran with it
I think people really underappreciate how, prior to EA, the foreign aid consensus was allergic to a) rigorously measuring outcomes b) giving no strings attached basics, like cash and malaria nets, rather than trying to do paternalistic convoluted reform programs
🚨New job alert 🚨
I'm really thrilled to soon be starting a Senior Researcher position with the extremely talented group of researchers at
@taxobservatory
! among many things to expand their work on illicit flows and on developing countries
🚨New working paper🚨 w/
@dszakonyi
@fhollenbach
We evaluate the impact of a new law requiring foreign companies that own UK real estate to report their ultimate owners
Early evidence suggests it led to a sustained reduction of investment through largely-secretive tax havens
Nice paper in the AER today about the impact of laws on social norms:
If you present people with vignettes of people who just barely cross a legal threshold into illegality, they rate the action as being much less socially appropriate
I had A's in Real Analysis I and II
Hell, I had a double degree in math and econ
Still got rejected by nearly every US school I applied to
Maybe bc my math GRE wasn't perfect (I don't always test well)
Maybe people are less incurious but realize just how terrible the game is
It's crazy how much development research is on "what works when I team up with this amazing NGO?" and not "how do we get governments to function better?"
That the intervention is a ONE DAY training encouraging mid-level bureaucrats to identify & implement process improvements suggests IMO a massive potential for performance gains from approaches that assume bureaucrats 1) know stuff and 2) want their orgs to work better.
🚨New research! 🚨
We used the leaked + public data from Dubai to:
◦ Estimate the % of foreign-held real residential estate in 2020 and 2022
◦ Show the influx of Russian nationals into the city and estimate how much real estate they bought after the Ukraine invasion
🧵👇
So this is big if true
To be clear: what appears to have been leaked are suspicious transaction reports (SARs)
these are sent by banks to FinCEN when they detect a transaction they think might be related to money laundering or terrorist financing
I'm reliably told that the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), the group that published the Panama Papers, have massive tranches of leaked financial records from FinCEN and are preparing to publish a slew of articles.
Those wanting to play around with some of the aggregate data from the
#PandoraPapers
may find this useful: I 'scraped' the country totals from two graphs that the
@ICIJorg
has produced. You can find Stata + .csv files here:
Everyone is talking about this great new paper that pins down estimates of tax evasion by the rich in the US
But we aren't talking about the fact that it is a result of collaboration between academics and the IRS
We need more of that, but also in the space of money laundering
Breaking my Twitter hiatus for some news:
This September I'll be joining
@BrookingsGlobal
as a David M. Rubenstein Fellow in Global Economy and Development
Excited, honored (& a little intimidated!) to join such an accomplished cohort
More info here:
One little known fact about the World Bank is that every year it runs an internal charity drive, where staff are incentivized to give to a select list of non-profits
The part of the Bank that is the most dominated by economists always has one of the lowest contribution rates
The new
@AEAjournals
policy on illegal data is too broad & threatens to exclude a swath of research based on leaked data, crucial to our understanding of tax evasion and illicit flows
e.g here are already-published papers that would have been excluded:
Clear evidence that employers discriminate against nonbinary individuals.
All-else-equal, disclosing that one uses "they/them” pronouns substantially lowers the chances of getting a job interview.
I've decided to leave the
@WorldBank
early next month, after nearly six years as staff*
I'm taking advantage of the fact that I'll be following my Fulbrighting partner to Lima for 6 months to do a couple of things 🧵👇
* Minus a 2 year sabbatical at
@BrookingsGlobal
It has been a really rough ride since last spring
But nothing has brought me more joy than than learning that in the UK my mom (71 - an NHS worker) got vaccinated this morning and that my dad (80) is getting the jab tomorrow
This is a terrible idea Bill. Why go after foreign aid and not the umpteen other Federal spending areas which are not helping the American poor? Do you really believe that aid is so ineffective - even from a non-development short term welfare perspective?
Great Angus Deaton article on how extreme poverty in the US is more frequent than previously thought, some foreign aid should shift from abroad to back home
🚨Working paper alert🚨 w/
@fhollenbach
&
@dszakonyi
We evaluate
@USTreasury
's pilot program to eliminate anonymous real estate ownership in US real estate
Care about seizing Russian oligarch wealth & making the economy less hospitable to corrupt and criminal assets?
🧵⬇️
One of the greatest own-goals of the SDG process is the fact that 8 years later, progress can't be measured in about half of all countries due to lack of data
My amazing former Oxford peep
@EconCath
+
@danilaserra_eco
randomly allocated female econ role models to econ classes and had a sizable impact on subsequent enrollment in economics classes by female students! SO COOL
The men don't really react, which is sad.
Older people must find it really frustrating that young people aren't taking seriously a crisis that requires immediate action but the consequences will largely be borne by another generation of people
Despite being an economist for a long time now, I don't think I ever fully appreciated gains from trade as much as right this minute when I was forced to cut my own hair
A casualty of
@elonmusk
new self-serving policy banning the tracking of private jets on Twitter has been
@ruoligarchjets
- an account which tracked the jets of Russian oligarchs
So glad we're protecting the privacy of people who are supporting Putin's war
You have got to be kidding me. Poor Americans do deserve attention - but ODA is not the only funding source for fighting poverty. The answer isn't to pit poor Americans against poor Liberians, it's to shift more of the non-ODA budget to poor Americans.
Ethiopia raised its legal age of marriage from 15 to 18. Girls just under 15 at that time were much more likely to marry later in life. Knock-on effect: a drop in infant mortality of firstborns of nearly 4% for each year delayed - presented by
@jorgeghombrados
at
#OxCSAE2018
In which I point out that Isabel dos Santos's network of companies largely operated in countries with strong anti-money laundering institutions and low levels of corruption
That's awkward, read more below (thread a bit later)
Yay, my paper "Tribe or Title? Ethnic Enclaves and the Demand for Formal Land Tenure in a Tanzanian Slum" will be coming out in EDCC! (um, sometime in 2020)
Accepted draft here:
This is the usual take, but not the one we need right now: the dos Santos case doesn't just demonstrate that corruption is a problem, it reveals that richer countries and tax havens have financial systems which are largely tolerant of that corruption
More on this later today!
A few years ago I suddenly started getting light heart palpitations
They were benign, but did I leave it at that?
No of course not, I ran a RCT on myself to see if coffee was making it worse
The results led to some navel-gazing about my empirical work
Today we celebrate one of my two nationalities gaining independence from the other. Kind of like celebrating your parents getting that divorce that seemed to make sense at the time but now both parties are terribly unhappy and making bad life choices.
I am eternally grateful that Oxford's development econ masters program saw something in a kid who loved development from Clemson University. The other Americans in the class were from Stanford and Harvard.
My *screw academia* moment came when I had recently started working at
@CGDev
and went to present a paper at a top UK university in front of an econ-heavy crowd
It was a paper I was excited about and thought it would be a friendly crowd
I was wrong
Twenty months and a global pandemic since we last saw each other in person, but the other day, while arguing with
@scepticalranil
about whether Stata or R was superior (over a bottle of wine), I realized that not that much has changed after all
Since giving advice to new econ PhD students is a thing:
Be kind and generous to other students. Find like-minded friends who are going to help and support each other through coursework and research, and who are going to reduce - not amplify - the stresses of academic life.
Disconcerting results in this 2018 working paper by Hawkins, Wolferts & Dan Nielson:
* Peruvian policymakers were randomly contacted by either a Peruvian or American tasked with sharing new evidence on development policy
* Americans were 2x more likely to get a response
Many WB critics have this view that it fiddles the numbers in order to serve some grand pro-market / progress narrative
The sad reality is that most of the unreasonable political pressure / tampering comes from really *big* client countries who don't like looking bad
World Bank has withdrawn three papers, including one that flagged a “most concerning” (12 percentage points) decline in the use of toilets in rural India between 2018 and 2021. "Institutional structures that supported Swachh Bharat were not sustained.”
The life cycle of self-deception for an academic-turned-think tanker turned-bureaucrat:
"This research paper is really going to inform policy."
"This blog post is going to blow things wide open."
"This 50 page project summary will change minds around here."
#PandoraPapers
the new offshore data leak, appears to be much, much bigger than the Panama Papers
This is an amazing accomplishment by investigative reporters
But I want to talk about data, and who should have access to it
We're hiring someone to run the
@CGDev
twitter account. DM me and I'll put in a good word for you if you promise to RT all my snark from the company account.
There's a lot of talk about identifying, freezing and seizing Russian oligarch wealth abroad
When those individuals are named and sanctioned by regulators, banks can identify them and carry out the order
But what about those with mass wealth who haven't yet been identified?
The WBRO just published my upcoming review article on illicit financial flows (IFFs)
Check it out for a discussion on how IFFs can be defined and a lengthy review of empirical work on money laundering, tax evasion, etc
For all my dear friends who enjoy figures at the end:
From now on, instead of embedding images in my tweets, my threads will be all text and then just half a dozen animated gifs at the end, w/ references the reader can use to flip back & forth between the two
See Fig(1)
DC was the only city I was every recognized in public for anything.
About 4 years ago, in the (sadly now closed Science Club) - someone walked up to me and said:
"Are you Matt Collin...... from Aid Thoughts?"
I melted into a puddle.
Only-in-DC moment—> On metro platform tonight, a man approached me and sheepishly asked, “aren’t you Todd Moss?”
“Um, yes.”
“I loved your working paper on how to build a think tank.” 😜
Some thoughts after observing how people talk about this:
Workplaces really should give people with families the flexibility they need
But that doesn't mean that people without families should be expected to 'pick up the slack', for two reasons:
🚨 New journal alert 🚨
Development economists and other social scientists working on the Africa region:
The University of Dodoma has a new journal: African Economic Perspectives (AEP)
They are accepting submissions for their first issue now!
Info below
An interesting exercise for development folks, EAs and "global citizens" would be a news aggregator that produced a front page that weighed and valued all human lives equally, regardless of where in the world they were born, or what their relative status was
@kopalo
@rambletastic
@ryancbriggs
Think it's probably also reasonable to point out that the publication process seems to be driving a part of this. Going back to the working paper version and comparing it to the final published version... I mean, wow
According to an index developed in 2015, Earth is not the most habitable planet found yet. Kepler-442b, a rocky near-Earth-sized exoplanet that is 1206 light-years away from Earth, has a rating of 0.836. On the other hand, Earth has a rating of 0.829
I feel like it is highly unlikely that these people live out their everyday lives as if there is a 1 in 5 chance that a massive catastrophic event will occur in the next five years
Some argue that we shouldn't get annoyed when an index shows a country improving when we know it performs poorly in other dimensions. I agree!
Apropos of nothing, I randomly chose a country (Saudi Arabia, how random!) to see how it scores on some World Bank-produced indices!