[matthjensen]

Most policy decisions these days are heavily influenced by proprietary forecasting models.

Just look at the fuss that was made because the House passed a health bill without a Congressional Budget Office score. The CBO score will certainly play a large part in the Senate's rewrite. The problem is that the CBO and other organizations like it are quite secretive about their modeling. Most of the time they only produce point estimates, and they don't publish many of the assumptions behind their modeling. When there is a bill that contains both taxes and spending, the Joint Committee on Taxation models the tax part, the CBO models the spending part, and they just smash the results together because even those two organizations aren't willing to share and integrate their models.

The NY Fed is serving as an important leader in this field. Policy analysis should be transparent and scientific, and that's what the NY Fed is moving the field towards.

[matthjensen]

The Open Source Policy Center, where I work, is focussed on this issue. www.ospc.org Most of OSPC's work is focussed on fiscal policy rather than monetary policy.

[Gtifn]

What languages do you use?

[matthjensen]

Primarily Python.

See, for example, https://github.com/open-source-economics/tax-calculator. We also make many of the models available through webapps like https://www.ospc.org/taxbrain and https://www.ospc.org/ccc. The source code for those is available at https://www.github.com/opensourcepolicycenter/webapp-public