Not now, millions of scorpions. www.newsweek.com/millions-of-...

Oh give me a break

Just the kind of deaths the 35 hour work week was supposed to do away with

VICTORY! Government to open up the Land Registry - bringing to an end a thousand years of secrecy shrouding who owns England. I’ve been campaigning for this for ten years: the new Land Use Framework, published later today, makes it government policy. 1/ www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Come work with us (and me!)

We recently got pre-challenged by a barista in Amsterdam at an independent cafe, who asked us "is that baby going to cry?" as we approached with our 13 month old So we instead went to a soulless corporate slab of a restaurant where nobody cared

Today's cool young researcher #econtwitter #econsky is @SubarnaBee @uniGoettingen who works on topics related to education, gender, and political economy

Every U.K. job ad is like “we seek a dynamic, world-leading expert to care for priceless, load-bearing activities. Salary: £28,000 p.a.”

Netanyahu Calls Iran Strikes Necessary To Prevent War He Just Started

🚨 A defining moment for global health data. The termination of the #USAID-supported Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) Program has wide-ranging consequences. We reflect on the collapse and argue what should come next in a new PNAS: doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2… 📊 9,000+ studies

Happy Techno Tuesday www.youtube.com/watch?v=F8Nh...

After years of hand-wringing and fighting with Bluehost's weak Wordpress protection, I finally have resurrected an archived, html version of Aid Thoughts at the original address, with a little help from Claude! aidthoughts.org With original comments and images!

There are there middle aged men at the table next to me in this cafe all collectively having a voice conversation with Mistral or Chat GPT or something while they have their coffee and croissants what is even happening

Self-recommending. @johndellosso.bsky.social is an excellent investigator and this seems like a great way to train the next generation of bright young sleuths

"America will get better and better," declared the Reverend Jesse Jackson on the stage of the 1988 Democratic National Convention. "Keep hope alive." Find some hope today in Jackson's speech as we remember the life of one of America's civil rights icons.

Today I’m proud to launch the Investigative Simulations Lab (@investigativesimulations.org), an organization that designs and delivers simulation games that show journalists and researchers how to follow the money and uncover wrongdoing.

What is never very clear from @chainalysis estimates is whether they are measuring a true intensive margin, or just a measurement extensive margin: in the past year they just got better at detecting human trafficking www.chainalysis.com/blog/crypto-...

We'll take your assets, just not your people www.theguardian.com/world/2026/f...

Grumpy opinion: Too many young development economists are working on behavioral econ questions that are unimportant for development. The topics are amenable to small experiments that can nail mechanisms and demonstrate smarts via a clever design. The profession over-rewards those attributes.

We are now the International Tax Observatory!

This is actually real: marchforbillionaires.org

How effective are transparency innovations in curbing offshore tax evasion? We’re spending the next two days examining the latest evidence on illicit financial flows. 🎙️ Opening remarks by @gabrielzucman.bsky.social. Can’t make it? Catch the full recording on our YouTube later this week!

Very happy to have had the chance to present our work (w. @mattcollin.bsky.social & @szakonyi.bsky.social) on the effects of the Economic Crime Bill and its beneficial ownership transparency on secretive real estate ownership in the UK.

"The ultimate owners of almost 45,000 UK properties worth an estimated £190 billion are hidden from public view via offshore companies" New investigation by @thetimes.com / @danneidle.bsky.social uses beneficial ownership data from UK Register of Overseas Entities www.thetimes.com/life-style/p...

Some next level stuff from Fox News

On 5 February join @szakonyi.bsky.social @lizdavidbarrett.bsky.social & Tom Mayne for a deep dive into the potential for leaked data to underpin illicit finance research. David will present a new ACDC study into the effectiveness of de-risking as an AML tool, based on data from the #CongoHoldUp.

I am about 25% of the way into "Chokepoints," and while I find it to be an interesting history of "why did this happen when it happened" with a little bit of insight into the rooms where everything happened, I feel like I am wanting more actual analysis rather than recounting, maybe this improves?

Everything old is new again

I realise I'm just a freak, but living in a multicultural city is the best thing of all time, it's just the best possible human experience and i can not understand why anyone on earth would be like "weve got to destroy this"

Recently published in @itaxjournal.bsky.social "Safely opening Pandora’s box: a guide for researchers working with leaked data" by Annette Alstadsæter, Matthew Collin ( @mattcollin.bsky.social ) & Andreas Økland (@andokl.bsky.social) Available at: rdcu.be/eZfQl

For those applied economists that have experience with both, any sense of how Claude Code performs compares to OpenAI's Codex via VS Code?

Whoever made this 🫡

Cool, cool

Stephen Colbert on the ICE murder of Renee Nicole Good: “The message from this administration is clear. Only they determine the truth. And when their forces come to your city: obey or die. And if you die, you clearly didn’t obey. This should be an alarm bell for the entire country.”

We are truly in the dumbest timeline www.nytimes.com/2026/01/09/w...

I hope this isn't what it looks like. The mother of one of Musk's kids, who was being degraded by nonconsensual nudified images (incl of her while underage) -- and who had the audacity to speak up about it -- just posted a screenshot showing her account being demonetized.

The idea that London has become less safe in recent years is quite strange - just look at how once "dangerous" areas have been transformed in recent years. Gentrification comes with its own issues but streets are packed with visitors and city far more welcoming than when I moved here a decade ago.

A new paper by George Borjas—who served this past year in the Trump White House designing some of its anti-immigration policies—claims to display evidence of ideological bias among researchers who study immigration. doi.org/10.1126/scia... 🧵 Thread—>

Two minor updates, friends: - As of 1 January 2026, I'm an Associate Professor. - As of today, the first paper I started writing on palm oil, about a decade ago, is in print in the Journal of International Economics. Read, share, cite. Open access: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

WH sources say Venezuela's opposition leader committed the "ultimate sin": She accepted the Nobel Peace prize. “If she had turned it down and said, ‘I can’t accept it because it’s Donald Trump’s,’ she’d be the president of Venezuela today,” one said. www.washingtonpost.com/national-sec...

We should listen to this man, as he has very relevant and quite recent experience in killing lots of people

Very cool online tool that let's you see how your life might have turned out if you had been born in a different place on the planet. The biggest lottery in life is the "lottery of birthplace":

This is bad, but also these effect sizes are pretty tiny? Seems likely to be driven by a handful of firms

DOGE was A LOT less likely to cancel contracts from companies that donated money to Republicans than companies that donated to Democrats.

ICE detain father shopping on Christmas Eve—then steal his family's groceries. Then 3 agents divvy up his paid for food—taking what they want for themselves. "Can I just get the wife's number to call and let her know?" woman asks. "No, guess he should've complied," agent says. Yakima, Washington

Another bombshell opinion has been issued by the Court of Justice of the European Union (@eucourtofjustice.bsky.social) which says that public access to shareholder information isn't aligned with GDPR data rules and should be subject to a legitimate interest test www.linkedin.com/posts/stephe...

🧵1/ New research alert! 📊 Our latest paper, Global Offshore Wealth, 2001–2023, analyzes two decades of offshore household wealth — key to understanding tax evasion, illicit financial flows and wealth distribution worldwide. Here’s what we found👇 🔗 www.taxobservatory.eu/publication/...

It has become received wisdom in Brussels and Washington that there is a new “euro-sclerosis”: that the EU economy is lagging the US This view is wrong A little primer on the measurement of productivity – and why reports of the economic death of Europe are greatly exaggerated🧵

Further obvious evidence that allowing your cryptocurrency exchange to be used for money laundering is a really really bad idea decrypt.co/350490/coinb...