Conceptual introduction to tax-benefit microsimulation

I am currently writing up a few documents on slightly more technical ideas about income inequality.  For each one I also plan to do a presentation, and attach the presentation slides to this site (along with the document).

I delivered the first one a couple of weeks ago – however, as it wasn’t one that is of public interest I only gave it to a few close economists.  It was on microsimulation models and income analysis.  It was a high level conceptual piece, really just a literature review, but it will act as a start.  The document, and the slides.

This is a form of modelling used to try to understand tax-benefit policy, and the distribution of income, given the fact that people are inherently different!  If you are interested in how I justify the modelling technique with reference to methodology (there is a bit of a discussion of the Lucas Critique in there) you may like to look at the document, but I suspect most readers would find it boring and not particularly useful – which is understandable 🙂

The next one will be on income inequality indices.  I am already part of the way through it, the goal is to write up a bit of a history, build up the idea of thinking about “social welfare” and “need” in terms of these indices, discuss some axioms that we would presume should hold for them, then discuss the individual indices in detail.  Hopefully this will be a bit more exciting.