Methods and Tools for the Microsimulation and Forecasting of Household Expenditure

This paper reviews potential methods and tools for the microsimulation and forecasting of household expenditure. It begins with a discussion of a range of approaches to the forecasting of household populations via agent-based modelling tools. Then it evaluates approaches to the modelling of household expenditure. A prototype implementation is described and the paper concludes with an outline of an approach to be pursued in future work

Methods and Tools for the Microsimulation and Forecasting of Household Expenditure - A Review

This paper reviews potential methods and tools for the microsimulation and forecasting of household expenditure. It begins with a discussion of a range of approaches to the forecasting of household populations via agent-based modelling tools. Then it evaluates approaches to the modelling of household expenditure. A prototype implementation is described and the paper concludes with an outline of an approach to be pursued in future work

Models of Transportation and Land Use Change: A Guide to the Territory

Modern urban regions are highly complex entities. Despite the difficulty of modeling every relevant aspect of an urban region, researchers have produced a rich variety models dealing with inter-related processes of urban change. The most popular types of models have been those dealing with the relationship between transportation network growth and changes in land use and the location of economic activity, embodied in the concept of accessibility. This paper reviews some of the more common frameworks for modeling transportation and land use change, illustrating each with some examples of operational models that have been applied to real-world settings.Transport, land use, models, review network growth, induced demand, induced supply

Orcutt’s Vision, 50 years on

Fifty years have passed since the seminal contribution of Guy Orcutt [Orcutt,1957],which gave birth to the field of Microsimulation. We survey, from a methodological perspective, the literature that followed, highlighting its relevance,its pros and cons vis-`a-vis other methodologies and pointing out the main open issues.

Simulating Cohort Earnings for Australia.

This paper describes a dynamic microsimulation model of cohort earnings developed to consider redistribution during the working-lifetime in Australia. Microsimulation models were first used for economic analysis by Orcutt (1957), and are now commonly employed to undertake policy analyses in many countries around the world.INCOME ; SIMULATION ; ECONOMIC MODELS

An Integrated Agent-Based Microsimulation Model for Hurricane Evacuation in New Orleans

Mass evacuation of urban areas due to hurricanes is a critical problem that requires extensive basic and applied research. Knowing the accurate evacuation time needed for the entire region in advance such that the evacuation order can be issued on a timely basis is crucial for the officials. Microsimulation modeling, which focuses on the characteristics of individual motorists and travel behavior, has been used widely in traffic simulation as it can lead to the most accurate result. However, because detailed driver response modeling and path processing must be incorporated, vehicle-based microscopic models have always been used only to simulate small to medium sized urban areas. Few studies have attempted to address problems associated with mass evacuations using vehicle-based microsimulation at a regional scale. This study develops an integrated two-level approach by separating the entire road network of the study area into two components, highways (i.e., interstate highways and causeways) and local roads. A vehicle-based microsimulation model was used to simulate the highway part of the road traffic, whereas the local part of the road traffic simulation utilized an agent-based model. The integrated microsimulation model was used to simulate hurricane evacuation in New Orleans. Validation results confirm that the proposed model performs well in terms of high model accuracy (i.e., close agreement between the real and simulated traffic patterns) and short model running time. Sufficient evacuation time is a premise to protect people’s life safety when an area is threatened by a deadly disaster. To decrease the network clearance time, this study also examined the effectiveness of three evacuation strategies for disaster evacuation, including a) simultaneous evacuation strategy, b) staged evacuation strategy based on spatial vulnerabilities, and c) staged evacuation strategy based on social vulnerabilities. The simulation results showed that both staged evacuation strategies can decrease the network clearance time over the simultaneous evacuation strategy. Specifically, the spatial vulnerability-based staged evacuation strategy can decrease the overall network clearance time by about four hours, while the social vulnerability-based staged evacuation strategy can decrease the network clearance time by about 2.5 hours

An agent-based approach to assess drivers’ interaction with pre-trip information systems.

This article reports on the practical use of a multi-agent microsimulation framework to address the issue of assessing drivers’ responses to pretrip information systems. The population of drivers is represented as a community of autonomous agents, and travel demand results from the decision-making deliberation performed by each individual of the population as regards route and departure time. A simple simulation scenario was devised, where pretrip information was made available to users on an individual basis so that its effects at the aggregate level could be observed. The simulation results show that the overall performance of the system is very likely affected by exogenous information, and these results are ascribed to demand formation and network topology. The expressiveness offered by cognitive approaches based on predicate logics, such as the one used in this research, appears to be a promising approximation to fostering more complex behavior modelling, allowing us to represent many of the mental aspects involved in the deliberation process

Optimal Taxation, Social Contract and the Four Worlds of Welfare Capitalism

Drawing from the formal setting of the optimal tax theory (Mirrlees 1971), the paper identifies the level of Rawlsianism of some European social planner starting from the observation of the real data and redistribution systems and uses it to build a metric that allows measuring the degree of (dis)similarity of the redistribution systems analyzed. It must be considered as a contribution to the comparative research on the structure and typology of the Welfare State (Esping-Andersen, 1990). In particular we consider the optimal taxation model that combines both intensive (Mirrlees) and extensive (Diamond) margins of labor supply, as suggested by Saez (2002) in order to assess the degree of decommodification of seven European welfare systems. We recover the shape of the social welfare function implicit in taxbenefit systems by inverting the model on actual effective tax rates, as if existing systems were optimal according to some Mirrleesian social planner. Actual distributions of incomes before and after redistribution are obtained using a pan-European tax-benefit microsimulation model. Results are discussed in the light of standard classifications of welfare regimes in Europe. There appears to be a clear coincidence of high decommodification and high Rawlsianism in the Scandinavian, social-democratically influenced welfare states (Denmark). There is an equally clear coincidence of low decommodification and utilitarianism in the Anglo–Saxon liberal model (UK) and in the Southern European welfare states (Italy and Spain). Finally, the Continental European countries (Finland, Germany and France) group closely together in the middle of the scale, as corporatist and etatist.Optimal income taxation, tax-benefit policy, microsimulation, comparative social policy analysis, welfare state models