CJ Libassi

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.

Whoa, White House withdraws Trump’s controversial nominee to lead BLS after ousting predecessor over jobs data
www.cnn.com/2025/09/30/p...

How about this? drive.google.com/file/d/1QdMA...

Unarchiver was able to get it to extract for me.

Blast! I may have it on an old external hard drive - I can check later tonight

Does the file at this link work for you? web.archive.org/web/20210213...

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

Anyone know if anyone is doing any formal benchmarking of LLM performance on Stata tasks? www.statalist.org/forums/forum...

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.

Thanks for all you do for this package!

Vis method for decomposition now merged to main, feedback welcome!

Also could it handle “negative” contributions (variables that increase the coefficient) in a way that is visually intuitive?

This looks great!! Think it would scale well to many covariates?

Man, when @dieworkwear.bsky.social weighs in on EJ Antoni's outfits, it may shake the earth.

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.

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."

Thanks for maintaining it! Was very grateful to see that it was part of pyfixest.

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.

Lexington, KY

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

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...

@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!

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/

Truly thank you. Finding these emojis was the most exciting part of this.

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...

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

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

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.

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.

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

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:

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

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

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 …

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

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