Matt Collin @aidthoughts Twitter profile

Pinned Tweet

Matt Collin

@aidthoughts

1 year

You can find me at the other place at: @mattcollin

0

1

Last Seen Profiles

@kivmer_fp

@hibiki400cc

@whatoninreigate

@Abdurrahmaaaan1

@MetalMilesAlt

@jennaweakland

@melinscribe

@RSETIMoRD

@deegito_tdf

@design_inst_au

@profeadultos

@krynl_

@Bunnynx0

@Cosmet87

@IvetaLemo

@Partimerwriter

@DrHazratRahman

@bokeplokalmalam

@XI

@KingfisherBXM

@chris_ogey48542

@Moufamilygamer

@Julie_ClarkTX

@semtex4br8fast

@cody_morr

@cantloseyou2

@TeriakiSaurma

@ColorectalSURG_

@helloTechnoVans

@RBCsportandrec

@othiagopinheiro

@Susie3189

@paffairsafrica

@63_chk

@gpe

@TheSK2023

Matt Collin

@aidthoughts

2 years

Fucking hell

45

151

2K

Matt Collin

@aidthoughts

3 years

🚨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 👇

9

256

624

Matt Collin

@aidthoughts

1 year

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"

3

64

433

Matt Collin

@aidthoughts

3 years

Econs should think about this paragraph a lot From Dani Rodrik:

6

44

353

Matt Collin

@aidthoughts

3 years

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

4

20

298

Matt Collin

@aidthoughts

5 years

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

5

150

297

Matt Collin

@aidthoughts

3 years

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

4

18

288

Matt Collin

@aidthoughts

4 months

Adam Grant

@AdamMGrant

4 months

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.

388

5K

27K

8

35

263

Matt Collin

@aidthoughts

4 years

How long until the coronavirus pandemic gets its own JEL code?

3

24

233

Matt Collin

@aidthoughts

2 years

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

Armand Domalewski

@ArmandDoma

2 years

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

23

43

616

9

10

215

Matt Collin

@aidthoughts

2 years

🚨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

25

5

193

Matt Collin

@aidthoughts

1 year

🚨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

1

62

196

Matt Collin

@aidthoughts

1 year

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

2

32

178

Matt Collin

@aidthoughts

1 year

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

6

7

155

Matt Collin

@aidthoughts

4 years

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?"

Dan Honig (DanHonig.bsky)

@rambletastic

4 years

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.

4

5

30

9

28

160

Matt Collin

@aidthoughts

4 months

🚨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 🧵👇

3

62

152

Matt Collin

@aidthoughts

11 months

Am wed!

23

0

136

Matt Collin

@aidthoughts

4 years

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

Scott Stedman (indefinite hiatus)

@ScottMStedman

4 years

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.

213

2K

6K

4

54

120

Matt Collin

@aidthoughts

3 years

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:

5

37

123

Matt Collin

@aidthoughts

3 years

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

2

29

124

Matt Collin

@aidthoughts

5 years

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:

The David M. Rubenstein Fellows | Brookings

The Rubenstein Fellowship program, originally announced in 2017, is supported by a generous gift from Brookings Trustee David M. Rubenstein, co-founder and co-chief executive officer of the Carlyle...

www.brookings.edu

22

6

117

Matt Collin

@aidthoughts

1 year

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

14

15

111

Matt Collin

@aidthoughts

3 years

At the World Bank offices and someone is playing The Imperial March on a tuba outside

6

3

114

Matt Collin

@aidthoughts

1 year

Fun fact: Prigozhin turned the Wagner Group convoy around after receiving a strongly-worded SMS designed by the Kremlin's Behavioral Insights Team

6

12

108

Matt Collin

@aidthoughts

2 years

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:

4

23

110

Matt Collin

@aidthoughts

5 months

This tweet inadvertently acted as a replication of the main result

John B. Holbein

@JohnHolbein1

5 months

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.

3K

362

2K

7

11

105

Matt Collin

@aidthoughts

2 years

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

8

0

95

Matt Collin

@aidthoughts

7 years

Tenure must be amazing

Michael Clemens

@m_clem

7 years

“The Political Economy of @TheBlackPanther 's Wakanda” By economist Robert Subrick @JMU via @_alice_evans @audowla

3

24

51

1

10

93

Matt Collin

@aidthoughts

4 years

Boom, problem solved

5

8

93

Matt Collin

@aidthoughts

4 years

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

2

94

Matt Collin

@aidthoughts

6 years

This just in: free laptops still don't improve most schooling outcomes, even when they come with free internet access.

4

60

92

Matt Collin

@aidthoughts

4 years

I think about this paragraph a lot

4

15

89

Matt Collin

@aidthoughts

4 years

So how long until Nick Cox gets on Twitter?

6

2

89

Matt Collin

@aidthoughts

7 years

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?

William Easterly

@bill_easterly

7 years

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

12

58

64

3

21

82

Matt Collin

@aidthoughts

1 year

Fools, little did you know you can explain all of Africa with just (checks notes) two.... two factors????

9

0

79

Matt Collin

@aidthoughts

3 years

🚨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? 🧵⬇️

3

24

79

Matt Collin

@aidthoughts

1 year

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

3

21

76

Matt Collin

@aidthoughts

7 years

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.

6

50

75

Matt Collin

@aidthoughts

4 years

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

2

9

77

Matt Collin

@aidthoughts

6 years

My master's degree: derive this sharecropping model My subsequent job in a Ministry of Finance: make sure these things add up in excel

2

72

Matt Collin

@aidthoughts

2 years

Excited to rejoin the @CGDev family as a Non-Resident Fellow!

2

3

75

Matt Collin

@aidthoughts

4 years

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

6

5

73

Matt Collin

@aidthoughts

2 years

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

5

22

65

Matt Collin

@aidthoughts

7 years

Thoughts from @GreatDismal on how dystopia for some is opportunity for others

1

26

70

Matt Collin

@aidthoughts

7 years

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.

7

30

71

Matt Collin

@aidthoughts

1 year

A little strange not to just say "Bissau", no?

6

2

69

Matt Collin

@aidthoughts

7 months

We're moving to Paris in two months and I am going to simplify my wardrobe to just this every day

3

1

68

Matt Collin

@aidthoughts

6 years

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

0

24

67

Matt Collin

@aidthoughts

4 years

Proof that that idea you had that you thought was sooooo novel is already being worked on by at least one other person

4

2

67

Matt Collin

@aidthoughts

5 years

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)

5

51

68

Matt Collin

@aidthoughts

3 years

Proud that @BrookingsInst has joined the growing number of employers requiring that their employees get fully vaccinated

0

11

62

Matt Collin

@aidthoughts

11 months

Shot and chaser h/t to @andokl

0

6

62

Matt Collin

@aidthoughts

6 years

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:

7

8

61

Matt Collin

@aidthoughts

5 years

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!

4

11

57

Matt Collin

@aidthoughts

4 years

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

The Beat My Heart Skipped

Why some interventions might miss the larger picture

mattcollin.substack.com

4

10

59

Matt Collin

@aidthoughts

8 years

Very cool: watchdog NGO hides 200 GPS trackers in old computers, maps where US e-waste goes

3

81

58

Matt Collin

@aidthoughts

6 years

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.

0

5

58

Matt Collin

@aidthoughts

1 year

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.

1

0

55

Matt Collin

@aidthoughts

4 years

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

11

0

56

Matt Collin

@aidthoughts

2 years

When your research team goes out for fieldwork and the co-author who has only ever done theory comes along

2

1

52

Matt Collin

@aidthoughts

2 years

2

1

55

Matt Collin

@aidthoughts

7 years

Um, yikes: some researchers randomly-improved the Wikipedia pages of Spanish cities and increased tourism (# of nights stayed) by 9% those cities.

3

21

52

Matt Collin

@aidthoughts

3 years

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

3

1

53

Matt Collin

@aidthoughts

4 years

It doesn't get more DC than missing plant flyers @PoPville

7

52

Matt Collin

@aidthoughts

4 years

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.

2

6

51

Matt Collin

@aidthoughts

2 years

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

2

20

49

Matt Collin

@aidthoughts

9 months

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

Sourav Roy Barman

@Sourav_RB

9 months

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.”

19

298

636

2

10

48

Matt Collin

@aidthoughts

3 years

@aidan_perreault @emollick Sorry, but you just seem to be complaining that survey questions and table space are finite

1

0

46

Matt Collin

@aidthoughts

2 years

After leaving the Bank I wonder if I'll ever regain that "yes I am sitting in a 30 person conference room by myself" energy

3

0

48

Matt Collin

@aidthoughts

3 years

Me sitting around playing with a fun new dataset rather than making progress on my existing projects

1

2

48

Matt Collin

@aidthoughts

3 years

A real life photo of an Econ Job Market Rumors thread

Crab Smoking a Joint🇵🇸

@smoking_crab

3 years

Never has a picture made me so uncomfortable

594

2K

30K

0

2

48

Matt Collin

@aidthoughts

2 years

I do not know if the World Bank has taken our break up well

2

1

47

Matt Collin

@aidthoughts

8 years

Most importantly, it seems like the decline is probably an age effect NOT a cohort effect. So not driven by change across generations.

Max Roser

@MaxCRoser

8 years

Everyone now knows the viral NYT graph about declining support for democracy. Here is what is problematic about it:

9

343

383

1

34

48

Matt Collin

@aidthoughts

6 years

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."

2

5

48

Matt Collin

@aidthoughts

3 years

#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

3

18

44

Matt Collin

@aidthoughts

6 years

Ethnic diversity certainly doesn’t appear to be a threat to that panel. Yikes

Ben Stanley @bdstanley.bsky.social

@BDStanley

6 years

No. Happy to have solved that for you.

5

50

255

1

13

42

Matt Collin

@aidthoughts

3 years

Have you ever dreamed of fielding angry DMs from World Bank staffers? Dream no more:

Justin Sandefur

@JustinSandefur

3 years

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.

5

19

45

2

3

45

Matt Collin

@aidthoughts

3 years

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?

1

20

44

Matt Collin

@aidthoughts

4 years

I haaaaaave the pooowerrrrrrrr!!!!!!

6

0

45

Matt Collin

@aidthoughts

5 years

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

6

19

46

Matt Collin

@aidthoughts

3 years

Finally, my chance to milk my job in an international bureaucracy for easy cash

3

2

46

Matt Collin

@aidthoughts

4 years

Fuck off Nigel

Nigel Farage MP

@Nigel_Farage

4 years

Horrifying scenes in Washington DC before the election. Democracy in crisis. #antifa

9K

7K

23K

2

0

45

Matt Collin

@aidthoughts

3 years

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)

6

2

44

Matt Collin

@aidthoughts

4 years

@paulgp Coding, yes. Writing/reading, no.

1

0

44

Matt Collin

@aidthoughts

6 years

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.

Todd Moss

@toddjmoss

6 years

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.” 😜

9

16

436

2

0

44

Matt Collin

@aidthoughts

7 years

The #CSAE2018 conference programme is out - see what development economists around the world are working on:

1

25

42

Matt Collin

@aidthoughts

1 year

Someone woke up today and chose violence @economeager

2

3

42

Matt Collin

@aidthoughts

3 years

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:

2

3

43

Matt Collin

@aidthoughts

6 years

In honor of Romer's Nobel Prize, I'd like to present to you Ranil Dissanayake's classic, epic takedown of charter cities:

0

10

44

Matt Collin

@aidthoughts

4 years

🚨 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

4

22

43

Matt Collin

@aidthoughts

2 years

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

5

2

42

Matt Collin

@aidthoughts

7 years

I really, really miss blogs

3

9

44

Matt Collin

@aidthoughts

2 years

My unit at the @WorldBank is hiring people to work on tax and fiscal policy, check it out!

0

32

44

Matt Collin

@aidthoughts

3 years

@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

2

4

44

Matt Collin

@aidthoughts

2 years

Hey @elonmusk , how about a poll about giving the majority of your wealth away to high-impact causes?

6

3

43

Matt Collin

@aidthoughts

3 years

Massimo

@Rainmaker1973

3 years

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

202

715

4K

1

10

42

Matt Collin

@aidthoughts

3 years

I wrote "causally causes" during a bout of insomnia but think I'm going to start using it all the time

4

3

41

Matt Collin

@aidthoughts

1 year

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

3

4

43

Matt Collin

@aidthoughts

4 years

Can we design some sort of advance market commitment to pay off the first hacking group that can crack open EJMR's anonymity?

1

6

43

Matt Collin

@aidthoughts

5 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!

1

9

43