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CJ Libassi

@clibassi.bsky.social
941 followers 539 following 91 posts

phd student in econ and ed at EPSAatTC. formerly: SMPAGWU, College Board, CAPhighered, edpolicyford, ComunidadMadrid, pgcps.

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Reposted by CJ Libassi
NBER @nber.org · 14/07/2026
A guaranteed tuition offer shifted low-income students into a top university. The students graduated sooner and earned more selective degrees, narrowing the gap with higher-income peers, from Burland, Delaney, Dynarski, Leu, Libassi, Michelmore, Owen, Quiroga, and Salinas www.nber.org/papers/w35434
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Kate Musen @khmusen.bsky.social · 20/11/2025
I'm on the #EconJobMarket! I study how policies and childhood environments shape outcomes of low-income & vulnerable kids. In my JMP, I study the effects of allowing youth who would have aged out of foster care at 18 to stay until 21—offering support their peers not in foster care get from parents.
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CJ Libassi @clibassi.bsky.social · 21/10/2025
In case you missed our paper last week or are short on time - we have a quick writeup of it on the Community College Research Center blog: ccrc.tc.columbia.edu/easyblog/new...
ccrc.tc.columbia.edu
New CCRC Research on How Low-Income Students’ First Jobs Predict Earnings After Graduation
Practitioners, policymakers, and researchers have long sought to understand and improve the college experience so that many more students can make it to
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CJ Libassi @clibassi.bsky.social · 13/10/2025
Ultimately, we think these findings make a strong case for increased research & policy attention to understand which aspects of the transition may be most amenable to policy intervention. Lots more detail in the paper, hope you’ll give it a read! 10/10
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CJ Libassi @clibassi.bsky.social · 13/10/2025
Our descriptive evidence is consistent w/ intuitive conclusion: low-SES grads appear disadvantaged in the first job transition, regardless of the broader economic context, and this has consequences for earnings gaps years later. 9/
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CJ Libassi @clibassi.bsky.social · 13/10/2025
Overall, we find that diffs in first job transitions can explain *nearly two-thirds* of the year 5 residual earnings gap between high- and low-SES graduates (i.e., the gap that remains after controlling for other observable differences at graduation, including major, GPA, test scores, etc.) 8/
Horizontal bar chart showing how controlling for first job characteristics reduces earnings gaps between low- and high-socioeconomic status college graduates five years after graduation. Three horizontal bars extend leftward from zero, representing negative dollar amounts. The top gray bar shows an initial gap of $4,948 for observably similar graduates. The middle gray bar shows the gap reduced to $2,251 after controlling for first job salary, with a horizontal bracket and whiskers indicating a 55% reduction. The bottom blue bar shows the gap further reduced to $1,716 after controlling for all first job features, with a second horizontal bracket indicating a 65% reduction from the middle bar. Title states 'The Role of First Job Transitions in Explaining Earnings Gaps for Similar Low- vs. High-SES Grads, Five Years After Graduation.' Subtitle indicates data is from traditionally aged BA graduates from 2010-17 from a large urban public university system. X-axis shows dollar amounts from -$5,000 to $0.
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CJ Libassi @clibassi.bsky.social · 13/10/2025
Interestingly, the SES gap in the first firm’s *average* pay is substantially bigger than the SES gap in grads’ own starting salaries (even in percentage terms). In other words, low-SES grads start out at firms where they may have less “room to grow” 7/
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CJ Libassi @clibassi.bsky.social · 13/10/2025
Descriptively, low SES-grads are less likely to have already started working with their first post-college employer prior to graduation (34% vs. 40%), have lower starting salaries ($38K vs $43K) and work at lower-paying firms ($53K average vs $64K average) than high-SES grads 6/
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CJ Libassi @clibassi.bsky.social · 13/10/2025
To describe first job transitions, we look at time to first job, starting salary, industry, industry-major match, firm size and average pay (and a few other things too) - these are all predictive of earnings at year five 5/
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CJ Libassi @clibassi.bsky.social · 13/10/2025
We don’t examine these constraints directly, but begin by documenting large SES gaps in post-college earnings: even after controlling for a ton of other info on students’ background and grades, high-SES grads earn almost $5,000 (8%) more than similar low-SES grads five years post-grad 4/
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CJ Libassi @clibassi.bsky.social · 13/10/2025
But what if some groups have persistently rockier transitions to the labor market, even in boom times? E.g. what if low-SES students struggle more to land a good first job, not b/c of their school, major, or grades, but b/c informational, financial, or structural constraints get in the way? 3/
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CJ Libassi @clibassi.bsky.social · 13/10/2025
Context: While earnings bump for BAs remains strong, unemployment for recent grads has risen faster than other groups since 2022. Rigorous research shows economic conditions at graduation have long-run impacts, in part b/c it affects quality of grads’ first jobs 2/ www.newyorkfed.org/research/col...
newyorkfed.org
The Labor Market for Recent College Graduates
Data on employment outcomes for new graduates and young workers.
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CJ Libassi @clibassi.bsky.social · 13/10/2025
🧵 New working paper! In joint work w/ @jscottclayton.bsky.social, Veronica Minaya, & Joshua Thomas, we use admin data from a large public univ system to examine earnings gaps for high- vs low-SES college grads 5 years out & the role of first jobs in explaining the gaps. 1/ www.nber.org/papers/w34366
nber.org
Who Rides Out the Storm? The Immediate Post-College Transition and its Role in Socioeconomic Earnings Gaps
Founded in 1920, the NBER is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, an...
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Catherine Rampell @crampell.bsky.social · 01/10/2025
Whoa, White House withdraws Trump’s controversial nominee to lead BLS after ousting predecessor over jobs data www.cnn.com/2025/09/30/p...
cnn.com
White House withdraws Trump’s controversial nominee to lead BLS after ousting predecessor over jobs data | CNN Politics
The White House has sent paperwork to the Senate to withdraw the nomination of E.J. Antoni as head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, three sources told CNN.
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CJ Libassi @clibassi.bsky.social · 25/09/2025
How about this? drive.google.com/file/d/1QdMA... Unarchiver was able to get it to extract for me.
drive.google.com
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CJ Libassi @clibassi.bsky.social · 25/09/2025
Blast! I may have it on an old external hard drive - I can check later tonight
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CJ Libassi @clibassi.bsky.social · 25/09/2025
Does the file at this link work for you? web.archive.org/web/20210213...
web.archive.org
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Reposted by CJ Libassi
Ben Zipperer @benzipperer.org · 27/08/2025
one amazing feature here is simply loading the entire dataset would probably freeze your laptop! instead you can run this regression quickly and not worry about memory problems, thanks to the magic of duckdb and dbreg
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CJ Libassi @clibassi.bsky.social · 21/08/2025
Anyone know if anyone is doing any formal benchmarking of LLM performance on Stata tasks? www.statalist.org/forums/forum...
statalist.org
Anyone running benchmarks across LLMs for Stata skill? - Statalist
Curious if anyone has already tried comparing how well different LLMs perform on Stata coding tasks—not just casually, but using formal benchmarks. I’m
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CJ Libassi @clibassi.bsky.social · 18/08/2025
Certainly not arguing the status quo (where all sorts of award letter shenanigans can and do occur) is optimal, but just as a matter of calculation, how would you calculate the value of IDR, PSLF, borrower protections such as hardship forbearances, in school deferments, closed school discharge, etc.
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CJ Libassi @clibassi.bsky.social · 16/08/2025
Thanks for all you do for this package!
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Reposted by CJ Libassi
Alex @s3alfisc.bsky.social · 16/08/2025
Vis method for decomposition now merged to main, feedback welcome!
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CJ Libassi @clibassi.bsky.social · 13/08/2025
Also could it handle “negative” contributions (variables that increase the coefficient) in a way that is visually intuitive?
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CJ Libassi @clibassi.bsky.social · 13/08/2025
This looks great!! Think it would scale well to many covariates?
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CJ Libassi @clibassi.bsky.social · 12/08/2025
Man, when @dieworkwear.bsky.social weighs in on EJ Antoni's outfits, it may shake the earth.
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Reposted by CJ Libassi
Erika McEntarfer @erikamcentarfer.bsky.social · 02/08/2025
It has been the honor of my life to serve as Commissioner of BLS alongside the many dedicated civil servants tasked with measuring a vast and dynamic economy. It is vital and important work and I thank them for their service to this nation.
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COPAFS @copafs.bsky.social · 02/08/2025
AEA Statement on Dismissal of BLS Comm. "The independence of the federal statistical agencies is essential to the proper functioning of a modern economy. Accurate, timely, and impartial statistics are the foundation upon which households, businesses, and policymakers make critical decisions."
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CJ Libassi @clibassi.bsky.social · 31/07/2025
Thanks for maintaining it! Was very grateful to see that it was part of pyfixest.
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CJ Libassi @clibassi.bsky.social · 31/07/2025
I think these look great! Very logical way to put things together. The challenge in my mind is how to handle many vars? One thing I have toyed with for this is trying to plot the top N vars decomposition results. Something like this toy example I just had Claude code whip up on simulated data.
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Riley Acton @riacton.bsky.social · 29/07/2025
Excited to announce the call for papers for the inaugural MidSouth Education Policy Workshop, October 16-17, in Lexington, KY! Send us your abstracts on all things econ of ed & ed policy by 8/27. Grad students & early career folks especially welcome! Info & link to submit here: bit.ly/44TdiGf
Lexington, KY
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CJ Libassi @clibassi.bsky.social · 08/07/2025
ICYMI last week - take a peek at our new report to better understand the earnings prospects of the professional school programs Congress just (nearly) uniformly & dramatically changed liquidity provision for: pseocoalition.org/wp-content/u...
pseocoalition.org
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Clare McCann @claremccann.bsky.social · 02/07/2025
@jdmatsudaira.bsky.social and @clibassi.bsky.social explain what new graduate loan limits will mean, not only for borrowers in medical school but across the graduate education landscape. Check out this thread/follow @peerresearch.bsky.social for more!
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Jordan Matsudaira @jdmatsudaira.bsky.social · 02/07/2025
House/Senate are set to eliminate Grad PLUS, and put in place loan limits that would dramatically restrict graduate borrowing. Media coverage emphasizes impact this may have on very expensive programs like Medicine and Dentistry, but @peerresearch.bsky.social finds impact will be much(!) broader 1/
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CJ Libassi @clibassi.bsky.social · 30/06/2025
Truly thank you. Finding these emojis was the most exciting part of this.
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CJ Libassi @clibassi.bsky.social · 30/06/2025
Much more in the report, from tracing earnings trajectories across programs to how earnings paths interact with IDR. We hope you will take a read! Many thanks to the folks who volunteered to give comments on drafts, helping improve the report tons. Find it here:: pseocoalition.org/wp-content/u...
pseocoalition.org
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CJ Libassi @clibassi.bsky.social · 30/06/2025
On top of tracking debt-to-earnings over a longer period, we look at different parts of the distribution of earnings. Here for example is the interquartile range of earnings for all of the students in the PSEO data, which captures a recurring fact in the report: things are just different in medicine
Chart showing earnings ranges for professional programs 5 and 10 years after graduation. Horizontal bars display interquartile ranges with median lines. Programs from lowest to highest 10-year median earnings: Rehabilitation/Therapeutic Professions, Veterinary Medicine, Optometry, Law/JD, Pharmacy, Dentistry, and Medicine/MD. Medicine shows dramatically higher earnings than other programs, with 10-year median above $300k and upper range extending to over $500k. Most other programs cluster between roughly $100k-$150k for 10-year median earnings
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CJ Libassi @clibassi.bsky.social · 30/06/2025
Maybe the biggest headline is just how much higher earnings for these professional programs is than the (quite large!) debt levels reported by ED. Remember that this is over just the first 10 years following graduation, and we still see ratios of total earnings to total debt near or exceeding 10x.
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CJ Libassi @clibassi.bsky.social · 30/06/2025
New at @pseocoalition.bsky.social, @julia-turner.bsky.social & I have a new report on grad school debt & earnings over the medium term. For some key professional fields (🩺⚖️🦷💊🐾), we show the varied patterns both within & across areas of study, looking at the first decade of earnings after graduation
Scatter plot comparing median program debt (x-axis, $50k-$300k) vs 10-year cumulative earnings (y-axis, $0.5M-$2M) for professional programs. Medicine MD programs (pink squares) cluster in upper right with high debt ($150k-$250k) and high earnings ($1.4M-$1.8M). Law programs (blue circles) cluster in the bottom left corner with lower debt and lower earnings, though some elite programs show medicine-level earnings and somewhat higher debt than other law schools. Veterinary Medicine (green diamonds), Dentistry (plus signs) and Pharmacy (X marks) are distributed across middle ranges of earnings, but across wide ranges of the distribution of debt, with almost all pharmacy programs having lower debt than almost all dentistry programs. Physical therapy and veterinary programs have law-like earnings (between half a million and a million over 10 years), and while PT has law-like debt as well, veterinary debt is generally much higher and closer to medical school.
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Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham @paulgp.com · 20/06/2025
Absolute banger of a review by @economeager.bsky.social in the JEL of "We Are Not Able to Live in the Sky: The Seductive Promise of Microfinance" by Mara Kardas-Nelson www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=... Particularly enjoyed this concluding paragraph:
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CJ Libassi @clibassi.bsky.social · 12/06/2025
I feel like if there were one job you’d like more than economist it would be generating puns at super human pace for monthly paying subscribers
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CJ Libassi @clibassi.bsky.social · 22/05/2025
The @peerresearch.bsky.social newsletter has had lots of good stuff on things in the bill and I imagine will have something on the latest changes soon
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CJ Libassi @clibassi.bsky.social · 20/05/2025
More on what is possible in the new search tools here: simonwillison.net/2025/Apr/21/... The sort of many-source synthesis you are looking for would probably be a better fit for the o3 with deep research turned on or Gemini 2.5 + deep research
simonwillison.net
AI assisted search-based research actually works now
For the past two and a half years the feature I’ve most wanted from LLMs is the ability to take on search-based research tasks on my behalf. We saw the …
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CJ Libassi @clibassi.bsky.social · 20/05/2025
While not specialized for that task, I often have the new o3 or o4-mini flavors of chat gpt w/ web search option turned on search official docs for me and make user guides or answer specific questions - I usually start by pointing it to URLs where the docs are, but it can also find them on their own
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CJ Libassi @clibassi.bsky.social · 17/05/2025
not a standard battery or a free-for-all, but a literal secret third thing
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CJ Libassi @clibassi.bsky.social · 17/05/2025
you are both right & I certainly don't want to add to the list of steps in the publication process (making an exception of course for forcing everyone to report AMIP stats...). does seem like it would be nice tho for there to be a toolbox for detecting these things in a more systematic way
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CJ Libassi @clibassi.bsky.social · 17/05/2025
For sure - though I’m not sure that’s dispositive of the fact that there shouldn’t be a standard battery.
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CJ Libassi @clibassi.bsky.social · 17/05/2025
Truly the only compliment I want out of academia-sky, many thanks.
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CJ Libassi @clibassi.bsky.social · 17/05/2025
That seems too hard a problem given the wide variety of types of results people present in papers, but is there some better way to consistently formally test for simulated data? Again, not sure it makes sense, but it seems like the intuition of “this should have been caught” might imply some tests
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CJ Libassi @clibassi.bsky.social · 17/05/2025
At the risk of being overly literal about this whole endeavor of ours, one thing I’m sort of curious about is whether one could formalize the intuition of “too perfect” as a statistical test. Something like “too many of your effects are same signed & significant across all tests”
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Lauren Schudde @laurenschudde.bsky.social · 12/05/2025
The journal Research in Higher Education is seeking manuscripts using data from the National Center for Education Statistics for a special issue. Please read the full call for papers here and circulate to your networks! #RIHE link.springer.com/collections/...
link.springer.com
Call for Submissions using National Center for Education Statistics data
The journal Research in Higher Education plans to publish a collection of articles using data from the National Center for Education Statistics in the United ...
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