Behavioral-Responses

This document tells you how to begin using or contributing to Behavioral-Responses. Begin by reading the Tax-Calculator documentation and then the Behavioral-Responses user guide that describes how to write Python programs that use Behavioral-Responses together with Tax-Calculator on your own computer.

What is Behavioral-Responses?

Behavioral-Responses, which is part of the Policy Simulation Library (PSL) collection of USA tax models, estimates partial-equilibrium behavioral responses to changes in the US federal individual income and payroll tax system as simulated by Tax-Calculator. It provides two ways of doing this: (1) the response function, which contains higher-level logic that supports the Tax-Brain "Partial Equilibrium Simulation" capability and requires specification of only the elasticities, and (2) the quantity_response function, which contains lower-level logic that requires specification of the quantity whose response is to be estimated, requires specification of the marginal tax rates and elasticities to be used in the response calculation, and allows the response estimation to be conducted by subgroup with different elasticities for each subgroup.

Disclaimer

Results will change as the underlying models improve. A fundamental reason for adopting open source methods in this project is so that people from all backgrounds can contribute to the models that our society uses to assess economic policy; when community-contributed improvements are incorporated, the model will produce different results.

Getting Started

If you want to report a bug, create a new issue here providing details on what you think is wrong with Behavioral-Responses.

If you want to request an enhancement, create a new issue here providing details on what you think should be added to Behavioral-Responses.

If you want to propose code changes, follow the directions in the Tax-Calculator contributor guide on how to fork and clone the Behavioral-Responses git repository. Before developing any code changes be sure to read completely the Tax-Calculator contributor guide and then read about the Tax-Calculator pull-request workflow. When reading both documents, be sure to mentally substitute Behavioral-Response for Tax-Calculator and behresp for taxcalc.

The Behavioral-Responses release history provides a high-level summary of past pull requests and access to a complete list of merged, closed, and pending pull requests.

Citing Behavioral-Responses

Please cite the source of your analysis as "Behavioral-Responses release #.#.#, author's calculations." If you wish to link to Behavioral-Responses, https://PSLmodels.github.io/Behavioral-Responses/ is preferred. Additionally, we strongly recommend that you describe the elasticity parameters used, and provide a link to the materials required to replicate your analysis or, at least, note that those materials are available upon request.

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