Michael Early | Data Science & Quantitative Economics

Michael Early

MA Economics Student
CSU Fullerton

Welcome

I'm a quantitative economist finishing my Master's degree at Cal State Fullerton in May 2026, with a concentration in applied econometrics and labor economics. My graduate GPA is 3.93. Most of my work sits at the intersection of economic policy and data, and I care a lot about research design — getting the causal question right before worrying about the model.

Outside the thesis, I work as a Graduate Intern in Enterprise Architecture at First American, where I build dashboards and data pipelines in Power BI, SQL, and Databricks. At CSUF I also work as an Instructional Student Assistant and Graduate Researcher in the Economics Department.

On the side I have built out a few projects I am proud of: an NLP pipeline that uses GPT-4.1 to pull qualitative signals from Redfin listing descriptions and tests whether they add predictive power to a hedonic price model, and an NFL player prop model using XGBoost with Kelly-sized bets and live odds integration. Both came out of genuine curiosity about whether the tools could actually do what people claim they can.

I am based in Southern California and looking for roles in economic research, applied data science, or economic consulting starting May 2026.

Interests

Applied microeconometrics
Labor economics
ML + causal inference

Education

MA in Economics, 2026 California State University, Fullerton
BA in Economics, 2024 California State University, Fullerton

Featured Research

MA Thesis · 2026

Sector-Specific Wage Floors and Young Adult Labor Market Outcomes: Evidence from California's AB 1228

Michael Early · MA Thesis · California State University, Fullerton · 2026

Committee: Maria Casanova (chair), Pedro Amaral, Kristin Kleinjans

CPS + QCEW evidence on the first statewide sector-specific wage floor in US history. All-state TWFE, synthetic control, and contiguous-county border designs. The aggregate youth employment effect is small and not robust; adjustment runs through the intensive margin (wages up 2.1%, hours down 3.8%); and the paper's central contribution is compositional — workers without a high school diploma see employment declines while more-educated youth see gains.

PDF Case study →

Experience

Graduate Intern — Enterprise Architecture

First American · Santa Ana, CA

Jun 2025 – Present

Designed and deployed a production GPT-powered Q&A assistant over 200+ enterprise architecture documents, eliminating manual lookup workflows and enabling self-serve query resolution for internal engineering teams — reducing analyst overhead by ~3–4 hours per week
Built an agentic dependency-mapping pipeline that auto-extracts and graphs application relationships during system onboarding, surfacing architectural risk and creating the first standardized process for capturing cross-enterprise dependencies where none previously existed
Engineered reproducible SQL reporting pipelines over large-scale operational datasets, replacing ad hoc queries with auditable scheduled reports — reducing manual reconciliation time and enabling end-to-end auditability for quarterly performance reviews
Automated analytical reporting workflows enforcing methodological consistency across data products, improving reliability and transparency for cross-team stakeholders and senior architecture leadership
Presented enterprise-wide business architecture standings to executive leadership as part of the internship program, translating complex system-level findings into structured briefings for senior decision-makers

Instructional Student Assistant

CSUF Economics Department · Fullerton, CA

Jan 2025 – Present

Supported undergraduates in Intermediate Business Microeconomics through weekly office hours (homework, exam prep, concept review); proctored and graded exams across a 200-student course

Teaching Assistant — Principles of Microeconomics

CSUF Economics Department · Fullerton, CA

Jan 2025 – Aug 2025

Taught weekly discussion sections for 40 undergraduates in Principles of Microeconomics; graded assignments and exams for a 120-student course

Graduate Assistant — Institutional Research

CSUF Economics Department · Fullerton, CA

Jan 2025 – May 2025

Gathered, cleaned, and performed preliminary analysis on institutional enrollment data sourced from IPEDS; structured outputs to support departmental reporting and planning

Projects

Fast-Food Minimum Wage (AB 1228)

All-state TWFE on CPS microdata, triangulated with synthetic control and QCEW border-county evidence — small aggregate effect with compositional reallocation across education groups

Causal Inference

NFL Quarterback Wage Discrimination

Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition — racial wage gap disappears after controlling for on-field performance

Labor Economics

Forecasting Super Bowl Odds

Time-series models and efficiency tests on Super Bowl futures — market prices are informationally efficient

Sports Analytics

NFL Sunday Ticket Pricing Model

IO model of monopoly bundling — optimal pricing under exclusive distribution in broadcasting markets

Industrial Org

Housing Price Prediction

Gradient boosting with feature engineering — ensemble methods outperform OLS on held-out test set