This is a periodic newsletter of the interesting things we’ve seen and what we are thinking about in open source policy analysis.

The American Economics Association’s new transparency initiative at the PSL meeting. Lars Vilhuber, the data editor for the American Economics Association (AEA), joins the Policy Simulation Library* (PSL) meeting to discuss the challenges to greater transparency and reproducibility in economics research and the steps that the AEA has taken for curating research data and promoting reproducible research. The meeting takes place today at noon at AEI. Link

International Monetary Fund open-sources tool for financial stability analysis. The International Monetary Fund has published the source code for its growth-at-risk (GaR) framework. The GaR uses current macrofinancial conditions to estimate the distribution of future GDP growth and to monitor the evolution of risks to economic activity over time. Policymakers can use GaR analysis to estimate a range of possible future economic scenarios to inform their policies. Link and link

Planet Money finds the modal American. With the help of Ben Casselman from The New York Times, Planet Money offers a more realistic alternative to the mythical “average American” (how could a family have 1.9 children?). To find the modal American, Casselman uses Census microdata available from the IPUMS project to sort Americans on the basis of characteristics including age, race, neighborhood type, and education. To discover the typical American’s identity, listen to the Planet Money podcast episode or explore Casselman’s code on GitHub. Link and link

Tax-Cruncher joins the PSL Catalog. Tax-Cruncher* calculates a household’s federal tax liabilities and marginal tax rates under a range of customizable policy scenarios. Presenting as an easy-to-use web application and a flexible Python API, Tax-Cruncher recently met PSL’s criteria for transparency and quality and has been admitted to the PSL Catalog. Link and link

* These projects are attendees or graduates of OSPC’s incubator program.

Edited by Matt Jensen and Peter Metz