Carl Lieberman

Board Game Reviews

Sat, 25 Sep 2021 00:00:00 -0800

7 Wonders Duel

An impressive little game that somehow fits many of the highs of a game of Civilization into a fast-paced 30-minute drafting game. I enjoy the Pantheon expansion for strengthening science and military while adding more interesting choices and effects, but it does make it more thinky and slows things down.

4/5

Arkham Horror: The Card Game

A triumph in tabletop gaming. Deep deckbuilding, difficult decisions every turn, constant tension, and brilliant exploration of the design space. It is also mean, expensive, and administratively intensive. This is one I'm very happy to play with a friend and their complete collection rather than own myself.

Video Game Reviews

Sat, 25 Sep 2021 00:00:00 -0800

007: Nightfire

The single-player campaign is surprisingly deep thanks to challenges, some open levels, and plenty of weapons, but the package is rounded out by a great multiplayer mode with AI bots, a rarity at the time.

4/5

13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim

The best-told narrative I've ever seen in a game. Gripping for all 30+ hours, and had me constantly thinking about how all its pieces fit together. Superb localization and art.

New Paper on Bereavement and Creativity

Mon, 30 Oct 2017 00:00:00 -0800

I am proud to announce that Death, Bereavement, and Creativity, coauthored with Kathryn Graddy, is now available through the Articles in Advance series at Management Science. The paper explores the link between its eponymous concepts, finding that despite the folk "wisdom" that artists do their best work while suffering, the link seems to be negative. Media coverage by The Independent on an earlier version of the paper is available here. On a personal note, this paper represents my first published research paper as an author.

Blogging with Emacs, Org, and GitHub Pages

Tue, 16 May 2017 00:00:00 -0800

When I chose hosting and content management solutions for this website, I knew the blog portion would be the hardest. A bio page, a link to my GitHub profile, these are easy. But blogs are dynamic, and require much more background logic to manage. I made my hosting and content management decisions very deliberately, and I wanted to do a rundown of my setup in case anyone else finds it useful.

(Finally) Buying a Good Monitor: Adventures in Hedonism and Native 4K

Tue, 09 May 2017 00:00:00 -0800

I built my first computer about a decade ago and can still rattle off all of its components. Gigabyte EP45-UD3R, Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550, nVidia GTX 260 216 Core, 8 GB of OCZ Reaper DDR2 1066 RAM, a Western Digital 500 GB 7200 RPM hard drive, Creative Fatal1ty sound card, Antec 1200 case¹, 750 watt Corsair power supply, Lite-On 48x DVD-RW drive. I had no fewer than three Razer products whose names I will pretend not to remember. But even though I looked at it way longer than any other component, I couldn't tell you the monitor I had. It was a 1680x1050 flatscreen somewhere in the 22" to 24" range, and it was bad, but that's all I know. I just treated it as a necessary evil that took budget away from the real computer, like a Windows Vista license.

Five Months with Rocksmith 2014

Thu, 26 Jan 2017 00:00:00 -0800

Break on Through

I used to be pretty good with tiny fake guitars. Not "Through the Fire and Flames" good but still "Satch Boogie" good.¹ Many an evening was spent with friends and family over a copy of Rock Band or Guitar Hero: World Tour, but we as a civilization collectively decided after Lego Rock Band and Guitar Hero: Van Halen that the fake instrument rhythm games had gone too far, leaving sales dwindling and relegating our Fisher-Price instruments to the attic.

Integrating Baloo File Search with Emacs

Fri, 25 Nov 2016 00:00:00 -0800

I use KDE on the desktop. Although most of my userland operations are done in Emacs and Firefox, I tend to appreciate the choice when handling tasks more complex than text-based processes. KWin, the default window manager, features a superb set of per-application rules that come in handy while playing games, like forcing borderless fullscreen or always keeping a window on top. Plasma is stuffed to the brim with features and hooks, and I've exploited them before when writing my first Emacs package to ease certain operations between Emacs and my mobile devices. But one feature I've always missed has been desktop search. KDE offers the excellent Baloo, a file indexer that handles both metadata and content, and its integration with Krunner is the main reason I use the latter. As a matter of fact, despite Krunner's many features, like arithmetic and dictionary lookups, I only ever use it for finding files and launching applications. I can improve this workflow.

Introducing kdeconnect.el: My First Emacs Package

Sun, 23 Oct 2016 00:00:00 -0800

I've used Emacs since I was an impressionable sophomore in college hearing about this weird old program's ability to integrate with everything a social scientist needs: R, LaTeX, Bash, and just about anything else you can do with text on a computer. Though I started using GNU/Linux casually in middle school¹, I never really learned about how any of it worked or the culture around free software until I played with Arch Linux for the first time.² While Arch started it, Emacs is the piece of software that has stayed with me the most. For just about any computing task that isn't browsing the web or playing games,³ Emacs is front and center. I am heavily indebted to the Emacs community for writing extensions such as Emacs Speaks Statistics, AUCTeX, and org-mode that are integral to my workflow.

Research

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Working Papers

Nonresponse Bias in Labor Force Statistics: Estimates Using Administrative Data (contact for draft) (with Jonathan Eggleston, Yarissa Gonzalez, Tim Trudell, and John Voorheis).
Adapted from technical report: Incorporating Administrative Data in Survey Weights for the Basic Monthly Current Population Survey.

Publications

The Impact of Criminal Financial Sanctions: A Multi-State Analysis of Survey and Administrative Data (with Keith Finlay, Matthew Gross, Elizabeth Luh, and Michael Mueller-Smith).
American Economic Review: Insights 6.4 (2024): 490-508.
Working paper version: NBER Working Paper #31581.
Subsumes two prior working papers circulated as Criminal Court Fees, Earnings, and Expenditures: A Multi-State RD Analysis of Survey and Adminstrative Data (with Elizabeth Luh and Michael Mueller-Smith) and The Impact of Financial Sanctions: Regression Discontinuity Evidence from Driver Responsibility Programs in Michigan and Texas (by Keith Finlay, Matthew Gross, Michael Mueller-Smith, and Elizabeth Luh).

Teaching

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

ECO 343, Economic Inequality and the Role of Government, Princeton University (Nominated by professor for graduate school teaching award consideration)
Assistant in Instruction for Ilyana Kuziemko
Spring 2020

ECO 332, Economics of Health and Health Care, Princeton University
Assistant in Instruction for Veronica Grembi
Fall 2019

Econ 184B, Econometrics, Brandeis University
Teaching Assistant for Zhuan Pei and Davide Pettenuzzo
Fall 2014, Spring 2015