History of micro-simulation at PSE
Micro-simulation has a long history in the Paris School of Economics and in the previous research units.
The first model simulating the French tax and social system was developed at the Département et Laboratoire d’Economie Théorique et Appliquée (DELTA) by François Bouguignon and Pierre-André Chiappori, and given the name SYSIFF, to emphasise the scope of the modelling task initiated by these researchers. The first version worked from the 1975 Tax Income survey and resulted in French data-based publications (Atkinson, Bourguignon and Chiappori, 1988).
The model was then applied to the data of the Family Budget survey, and the modelling team (Olivier Bargain, José Sastre and Amedeo Spadaro) participated in the construction of the European micro-simulation model EUROMOD (Bourguignon et al., 2000).
Between 2002 and 2008, the Microsimulation and public policy analysis unit (MICROSIMULA), directed by Amedeo Spadaro, picked up and developed the SYSIFF model, applying it to the 2006 Family Budget survey and to the more recent legislation (Bourguignon and Spadaro, 2003, 2006).
In 2011, Camille Landais, Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez adopted the micro-simulation approach and added an innovation which consisted of using several data sources jointly, in order to improve the global description of the tax and transfer system. They also introduced a new interactive way to present results from micro-simulation models to the wider public, an approach that the IPP will also take.
With the creation of the Institut des politiques publiques, a new model that draws on this prior work – TAXIPP – has been developed with a dedicated team within the Institute.
Bibliography
- Atkinson, A., Bourguignon, F. et Chiappori, P.-A. (1988), « Fiscalité et transferts : une comparaison franco-britannique », Annales d’économie et de statistique, nº 11, p. 117-140.
- Atkinson, A., Bourguignon, F. et Chiappori, P.-A. (1988), «The French Tax-Benefit System and a Comparison with the British System », in Atkinson, A. et Sutherland, H. (éds.), Tax Benefit Models, STICERD, London.
- Bourguignon, F., O’Donoghue, C., Sastre Descals, J., Spadaro, A. et Utili, F. (2000), « A prototype European Tax-Benefit Model », in Gupta, A. et Kapur, V. (éds), Microsimulation in Government Policy and Forecasting, North-Holland.
- Bourguignon, F. et Spadaro, A. (2003), « Les modèles de microsimulation dans l’analyse des politiques de redistribution: une brève présentation » Économie et Prévision, nº 160-161.
- Bourguignon, F. et Spadaro, A. (2006), « Microsimulation as a Tool for Evaluating Redistribution Policies », Journal of Economic Inequality, vol. 4, nº 1, p. 77-106.
- Landais, C., Piketty, T. et Saez, E. (2011), Pour une révolution fiscale, La République des idées, Éditions du Seuil, Paris.
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