PolicyEngine's microsimulation package published in the Journal of Open Source Software
The peer-reviewed paper describing policyengine, the open-source Python package for UK and US tax-benefit microsimulation that powers PolicyEngine, is now published in JOSS.
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The paper describing policyengine, the open-source Python package behind PolicyEngine, has been published in the Journal of Open Source Software (JOSS) after peer review.
The package lets analysts work out how tax and benefit policies affect household incomes and government budgets in the UK and the US. It gives one workflow for both countries: calculate taxes and benefits for a single household, or run a microsimulation of the whole population on representative survey data, and compare current law with a proposed reform. The rules for each country live in their own packages, policyengine-uk and policyengine-us, while policyengine provides the shared tools for datasets, reforms, outputs and version-pinned releases, so a published estimate can be reproduced with the exact model and data that produced it.
The paper sets out why the package was built, how it compares with other microsimulation models in the UK and the US, and how it is used. It was written by Vahid Ahmadi, Max Ghenis, Nikhil Woodruff, Pavel Makarchuk and Anthony Volk, and reviewed in the open on GitHub.
Read the paper#
The paper is published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. You can read it below, open the PDF, or see it on the JOSS website with its review and archive.
How to cite#
If you use PolicyEngine in your work, please cite the paper:
Or in BibTeX:
Research Associate at PolicyEngine