Tutorial session: Analysing tax-benefit reform impacts with PolicyEngine

What do you want to teach?

This hands-on tutorial introduces participants to PolicyEngine, a free, open-source microsimulation platform for analysing tax and benefit policy reforms in the US and UK. Participants will learn to use PolicyEngines web interface (policyengine.org) to: (1) model a tax or benefit reform by adjusting policy parameters, (2) compute hypothetical household impacts showing how the reform affects a hypothetical households taxes, benefits, and net income, (3) run population-level microsimulation analysis to estimate budgetary cost or revenue, distributional effects across income deciles, poverty impacts, and winner/loser breakdowns, and (4) use PolicyEngines AI assistant (a Claude Code plugin) to conduct policy analysis from natural language prompts, including generating charts, policy briefs, and congressional district or constituency-level breakdowns. The session will use live examples relevant to current policy debates in both the US and UK.

Why is it useful?

PolicyEngine is used by governments (including No. 10 Downing Street), think tanks (Brookings Institution, CRFB, Niskanen Center), and researchers for rapid policy analysis. Unlike proprietary microsimulation models, PolicyEngine is fully open-source and requires no software installation—all analysis runs in the browser or through a Python package. This makes it accessible to researchers, students, and policy practitioners who need to evaluate reform proposals but lack access to established microsimulation infrastructure. The AI-assisted workflow further lowers the barrier, enabling users to conduct distributional analysis and generate publication-quality outputs from plain-language policy descriptions.

What is your expertise?

Max Ghenis is co-founder and CEO of PolicyEngine. He previously founded the UBI Center, a think tank researching universal basic income policies, and worked as a data scientist at Google. He holds a masters degree in Data, Economics, and Development Policy from MIT and a bachelors degree in operations research from UC Berkeley.