Alvin Christian

1/6 I've somehow made it 1 year through my pre-doc position without getting fired. To celebrate, I'll share a little write-up I made for those just starting. Recent grads and #EconTwitter might find it helpful. This is based on my specific experience. drive.google.com/open?id=16eUvt…

@DavidJo30329121 I like them

Anyone have strong opinions on personal anecdotes in papers? When drinking with a neighbor he asked about my research and I gave him the elevator talk. He responded with something along the lines of “Hell yeah. I bought all my guns right after Covid hit.”

that line on 712pm is still crazy to this day

The Trump administration is moving the $1.7 trillion federal student loan portfolio to the Treasury Department. There is a documented record of how that goes. In 2015, the Education and Treasury departments ran a two-year pilot study on exactly this arrangement. One year in, Treasury had completed loan rehabilitation - the process of helping defaulted borrowers get back into good standing and repair their credit - for eight borrowers. Out of a pool of 5,729. The pilot's own findings noted that student loans in default "differ significantly from other federal debts" and are "very difficult to resolve." It is unclear whether a final report was ever issued. Now the same transfer is being attempted at full scale, with 10 million borrowers currently in default. The Treasury bureau taking on this responsibility has 39 percent fewer staff than it did in 2024. Wayne Johnson, who ran Federal Student Aid during the first Trump administration, put it plainly: "Treasury will do an unbelievably good job at draconian collections. What they're not prepared to do - and they're not even thinking about it - is account rehabilitation." Treasury told the Education Department during the first Trump administration it did not want the portfolio. It "didn't have the capacity," and had "no understanding about the concepts of basically resolving a default or a delinquency." The agency appears to have been handed it anyway, likely through political intervention, according to former officials. For 10 million borrowers already in default, the difference between rehabilitation and garnishment is the difference between repairing their credit and watching it collapse further - at a moment when housing, food, and energy costs are already compressing household budgets across Indiana and everywhere else.

@BeatrizGietner "to all the boys I've loved before"

thesis submission in one week and i have no idea what to write here

In much of social science, “descriptive work” is a faintly pejorative label, because explanation is considered the real stuff. Why settle for dusty old “What?” questions when you can jump into the sexier “Why?” I get why this is so and am not innocent of the tendency. But I think this is a mistake, particularly in a period of dense and disorienting social change. The trouble with focusing on causality (or more often, pseudo-causality) is it necessarily forces us to attend to a narrow slice of empirical reality that we can get some traction on, and therefore cuts out a whole lot of context (which is usually brought in via assumption or assertion to make the our claims intelligible rather than accountable). Maybe we take some time to paint a more fleshed out picture of what’s going and, and then turn our attention to which theories or explanations might help us make sense of it taken as a larger whole.

@JohnJSSoriano @ben_golub The goal of an advisor is to give their students the lay of the land and not push them too hard. On the other hand, proving your advisor wrong is common in your PhD and IMO this is generally healthy as long as your advisor admits when this happens.

@jt_kerwin @nberpubs Congratulations!

Thrilled to be joining @nberpubs as a Research Associate in the Economics of Education! I got to present our new work on reading in Ghana at the spring program meeting yesterday—amazing audience & questions as always.

Pictured: Republican objections to Virginia's redistricting

I mean this very seriously: I think we will see the end of online degrees in the next 10 years.

The Stata command lwdid is now available on SSC -- it implements Lee and Wooldridge (2025) rolling DiD estimators. The methods are described here: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf… We provide methods similar to, and motivated by, Callaway and Sant'Anna (2021, Journal of Econometrics).

Skip that article Yale from the about the employess of the Yale Corporation, this is worth reading. Yes, it's written by a SUNY administrator making a case for his own institution. Read it anyway. The argument holds. geneseo.edu/enrollment-man…

I haven't read the article, but it's unfair to malign an entire discipline because of a few cases. Every field has its Ariely/Gino moments. I've been doing ed research for 10 years, and everyone I've worked with takes rigor seriously precisely because the stakes for kids are high

I am surprised we have yet to see a therapist/mental health counselor value-added paper given the plausibly random assignment of counselors you see at many universities. I wonder if there is a more data-rich—albeit less convenient—setting.

@MatthewAKraft Congrats!

What a privilege to be among the amazing artists, scientists, and scholars named as 2026 Guggenheim Fellows. Feeling inspired and extremely grateful for all the wonderful people in my life. #guggfellows2026 gf.org/stories/announ… 1/2

Why do people prefer standard over more cost-effective market-based instruments? I finally get to be an environmental economist in a new paper with @_josephshapiro @DmitryTaubinsky @maxlauletta and Chenxi Jiang

Supply and demand comes for us all

he just like me

This graph and headline should have made everyone scratch their head! The 40 year olds who allegedly “caught up” had much higher fertility at 30 years old than 30 year olds today do!

“Native” (lol) New Yorkers are just as much transplants as anyone else. You think this is the same city as it was 15 years ago ?

@BilgeErten Thank you!

@_AlvinChristian Amazing! Congratulations!!

now that i have a tenure track job i can go back to my real passion: trying to win back my ex-girlfriend