Development Roadmap¶
This public roadmap groups selected SimPaths development priorities into work underway, planned work, and capabilities in the pipeline.
Working on now¶
These items have active development tasks and the clearest near-term scope.
Wealth across the life course¶
Model how the assets and debts held by individuals and households evolve over the life course, including housing wealth, mortgages, pensions, savings, and unsecured debt, and how these interact with income and spending. This will enable SimPaths to analyse financial resilience, housing and debt pressures, resources available in retirement, and how wealth inequalities develop over time.
Validation against source data¶
Compare model estimates on simulated populations with their input-data equivalents to identify drift, implementation differences, and processes requiring recalibration. This strengthens confidence that estimated relationships remain intact once combined in the full simulation.
Parameter uncertainty¶
Expose regression-coefficient bootstrapping through configuration, command-line options, and documentation. This will allow repeated runs to represent parameter uncertainty consistently and make the resulting evidence easier to interpret.
Employment histories and health¶
Add modifiers estimated from longitudinal employment histories to the health modules. Connecting accumulated labour-market experience with later physical and mental health will support analysis of health inequalities across the life course.
Planned work¶
These priorities have defined development tasks, but their timing and order depend on data, estimation work, and related model changes.
Labour supply, mental health, and childcare¶
Re-estimate labour supply with individual effects and incorporate mental health, Universal Credit, care time, and childcare costs where supported by the data. This will improve analysis of employment responses that vary with health, caring responsibilities, and benefit receipt.
Multidimensional wellbeing¶
Integrate multidimensional wellbeing outcomes into the model, update the initial populations, and validate the new processes. This would extend analysis beyond income and employment.
Migration and population representation¶
Define immigrant status consistently, clarify its relationship with ethnicity, and assess where it should enter behavioural processes. Clearer population definitions will improve comparisons across groups and prepare the model for later migration and synthetic-population developments.
Regional matching and performance¶
Extend tax-benefit donor matching by Government Office Region, make partnership matching scalable through population partitions, and improve tax-donor parsing and yearly simulation performance. Together these changes will support regional analysis, larger populations, and repeated simulation runs.
Alignment and model state¶
Estimate alignment adjustments once for reuse across scenarios, compare alternative alignment approaches, and make the initialisation and updating of lagged variables consistent. This will produce cleaner comparisons between baseline and policy scenarios.
Capabilities in the pipeline¶
These capabilities would materially extend the questions SimPaths can address, but their scope and timing are not yet fixed.
Unemployment and retirement transitions¶
Identify unemployment before labour-supply choices, incorporate health into the utility function, allow selected post-retirement employment, and re-estimate wages for the European models. This would provide a richer account of worklessness, return-to-work decisions, and work after retirement.
Migration and synthetic populations¶
Develop explicit migration processes and starting populations that reduce dependence on restricted microdata where appropriate. This would support clearer demographic scenarios and make adaptation to new settings more practical.
Macroeconomic context and transfers between households¶
Represent wider economic conditions and transfers between households beyond the immediate benefit unit. This would enable analysis of economic shocks, family support, and redistribution between households.
SIPHER-7 outcomes and health-sensitive mortality¶
Add SIPHER-7 measures and a mortality process that reflects health differentials. This would show how health inequalities accumulate over time.
Suggest a priority or collaborate¶
To suggest a priority, contribute evidence, or discuss collaboration, open a GitHub issue or contact the SimPaths team at info@simpaths.org.