SimPaths
Life Course Microsimulation
SimPaths is an open-source framework for modelling individual and household life courses. It projects how people’s careers, family relationships, health and financial circumstances evolve over time and interact with one another. Its modular design supports analysis of alternative assumptions about tax and benefit systems, sensitivity to parameter estimates, and different approaches to projecting labour and leisure, consumption and saving decisions.
Standardised assumptions and data sources facilitate adaptation across countries. Models based on the framework currently exist for the UK, Greece, Hungary, Italy and Poland, with Germany, Spain and Sweden under development.
All source code is freely available for download under a European Free/Open Source Software (F/OSS) EUPL-1.2 license, alongside evolving, increasingly detailed documentation.
The framework incorporates many state-of-the-art features which are rarely combined in dynamic models:
Life-course feedback
Education, work, income and wealth, family life, and health evolve together rather than as isolated outputs.
Policy realism
An underlying tax-benefit model links individual outcomes to population-level policy effects.
Behavioural responses
Time-use and savings choices respond to characteristics, fiscal incentives, and future expectations.
Modular design
Java and JAS-mine provide a modular architecture for switching assumptions and projection methods.
Country adaptation
Model dynamics are decoupled from tax-benefit systems, making the framework easier to adapt across country settings.