PolicyEngine tutorials

Hands-on sessions for analysing tax and benefit policy reforms — household by household, or across the whole population. Everything runs in your browser.

IMA World Congress 2026 · Brussels

Analysing tax-benefit reform impacts with PolicyEngine

Friday 3 July, 10:30–12:00 · Room F (2300) · UCLouvain Saint-Louis Bruxelles · Max Ghenis (PolicyEngine)

Open the notebook in Colab Open the web app Setup instructions

What you'll do

This session uses live US and UK examples to walk through the full PolicyEngine workflow:

1 · Reforms

Adjust a policy parameter

Change a tax rate or benefit amount and see the rules update.

2 · Households

Compute a household's impact

How a reform changes one family's taxes, benefits, and net income.

3 · Population

Run a national microsimulation

Budgetary cost, distribution by decile, poverty, and winners and losers.

4 · AI assistant

Ask in plain language

Drive the whole analysis from a prompt with the Claude Code plugin.

What you need to participate

Almost nothing. This tutorial is browser-based — a laptop with a modern browser and the conference Wi-Fi is enough. The steps below are optional, for going deeper.

Required · everyone

A browser

Confirm you can reach policyengine.org and app.policyengine.org. The household calculator, reforms, and population analysis all run there — no account, no install.

Optional · for the notebook

A Google account

To follow the Python notebook in Google Colab — runs in your browser, nothing installed. Open it ahead and run the first cell to save time.

Optional · run locally

Python ≥ 3.10

Prefer your own machine? pip install policyengine installs the US and UK models.

Optional · demo

The AI assistant

The Claude Code plugin is shown live — nothing to install to follow it. To try it yourself you'll need Claude Code and an Anthropic account.

Hands-on examples use the US model, whose microdata is open. The UK model works identically, but its population microdata isn't publicly downloadable, so UK population analysis is shown by the presenter.

Questions about this tutorial or the setup? Email max@policyengine.org.