December 2020 Newsletter

This is a monthly newsletter of PSL model releases, events, and updates.
Subscribe at https://www.pslmodels.org and follow us on Twitter @PSLModels.

New Initiatives

• PSL launched a new "Demo Day" series where developers have showcased Tax-Brain (with Matt Jensen and Anderson Frailey), Tax-Cruncher (with Peter Metz), and Cost-of-Capital-Calculator (with Jason DeBacker). Subscribe to our YouTube channel and stay tuned for our future events!
• PSL also has a new blog for sharing major updates on our catalog. Check out the latest on Cost-of-Capital-Calculator and drop our editor, Max Ghenis, a line to share your work or suggest content.

Cost-of-Capital-Calculator

A model that evaluates the effect of US federal taxes on businesses' investment incentives

General updates

• Presented at the PSL Demo Day and featured in the PSL blog.

OpenFisca-UK

A model of the United Kingdom's tax system based on the OpenFisca platform

Releases and new features

• Release 0.2.0  —  Enriched tax modeling, added tests, and updated API.
• A UK legislation explorer with a web app for the model's variables, parameters, and formulae.

General updates

• This is a newly cataloged PSL project!
• Created with OpenFisca, an open-source computation engine that "makes law computable," OpenFisca-UK is a model of the United Kingdom's tax system.
• Check out its documentation for a demo that calculates the National Insurance liability by region.

Tax-Brain

An integrator package for multiple open source tax models

General updates

• Presented at the latest PSL Demo Day.

PCI-Crackdown ^*

A machine learning algorithm that predicts crackdowns on protests by the Chinese military

General updates

• The model will be presented as a poster session at the Allied Social Science Associations' annual conference from January 3 to 5.

PCI-Outbreak ^*

A machine learning algorithm that estimates the true scale of epidemic outbreaks in China

Releases and new features

• Updated the index for COVID-19 in China to September 15, 2020 (#1).

General updates

• The research behind the algorithm, which estimates the severity of COVID-19 in China, was released as a Mercatus Working Paper.
• The model will be presented at the Southern Political Science Association’s annual conference on January 7.

• Behavioral-Responses is a partial-equilibrium behavioral module that works with Tax-Calculator.
• Cost-of-Capital-Calculator evaluates the effect of US federal taxes on businesses' investment incentives.
• microdf is a package for analyzing economic microdata as pandas DataFrames.
• OG-USA is an overlapping-generations model for evaluating fiscal policy in the United States.
• OpenFisca-UK is a model of the United Kingdom's tax system based on the OpenFisca platform.
• ParamTools is a library for parameter processing and validation with a focus on computational modeling projects.
• PCI-China is a machine learning algorithm that predicts China's policy changes by mining its state-controlled media.
• Tax-Brain is an integrator package for multiple open source tax models.
• Tax-Calculator is a USA federal individual income and payroll tax microsimulation model.
• Tax-Cruncher calculates federal tax liabilities from individual data under a range of policy scenarios.