OG-VA

OG-VA is an overlapping-generations (OG) model that allows for dynamic general equilibrium analysis of fiscal policy for the US state of Virginia. OG-VA is built on the OG-Core framework. The model output includes changes in macroeconomic aggregates (GDP, investment, consumption), wages, interest rates, and the stream of tax revenues over time. Regularly updated documentation of the model theory--its output, and solution method--and the Python API is available at https://pslmodels.github.io/OG-Core and documentation of the specific Virginia calibration of the model is available at https://thecgo.github.io/og-va/.

Using/contributing to OG-VA

• Install the Anaconda distribution of Python
• Clone this repository to a directory on your computer
• From the terminal (or Conda command prompt), navigate to the directory to which you cloned this repository and run conda env create -f environment.yml. The process of creating the ogva-dev conda environment can take more than 20 minutes. The pip install of the OG-Core dependency from GitHub takes most of the time.
• Then, conda activate ogva-dev
• Then install by pip install -e .
• Navigate to ./examples
• Run the model with an example reform from terminal/command prompt by typing python run_og_va.py
• You can adjust the ./examples/run_og_va.py by modifying model parameters specified in the dictionary passed to the p.update_specifications() calls.
• Model outputs will be saved in the following files:
  • ./examples/OG-VA_example_plots
    • This folder will contain a number of plots generated from OG-Core to help you visualize the output from your run
  • ./examples/ogva_example_output.csv
    • This is a summary of the percentage changes in macro variables over the first ten years and in the steady-state.
  • ./examples/OG-VA-Example/OUTPUT_BASELINE/model_params.pkl
    • Model parameters used in the baseline run
    • See ogcore.execute.py for items in the dictionary object in this pickle file
  • ./examples/OG-VA-Example/OUTPUT_BASELINE/SS/SS_vars.pkl
    • Outputs from the model steady state solution under the baseline policy
    • See ogcore.SS.py for what is in the dictionary object in this pickle file
  • ./examples/OG-VA-Example/OUTPUT_BASELINE/TPI/TPI_vars.pkl
    • Outputs from the model timepath solution under the baseline policy
    • See ogcore.TPI.py for what is in the dictionary object in this pickle file
  • An analogous set of files in the ./examples/OUTPUT_REFORM directory, which represent objects from the simulation of the reform policy

Note that, depending on your machine, a full model run (solving for the full time path equilibrium for the baseline and reform policies) can take more than two hours of compute time.

If you run into errors running the example script, please open a new issue in the OG-VA repo with a description of the issue and any relevant tracebacks you receive.

Once the package is installed, one can adjust parameters in the OG-Core Specifications object using the Calibration class as follows:

from ogcore.parameters import Specifications
from ogva.calibrate import Calibration
p = Specifications()
c = Calibration(p)
updated_params = c.get_dict()
p.update_specifications({'initial_debt_ratio': updated_params['initial_debt_ratio']})

Disclaimer

The organization of this repository will be changing rapidly, but the OG-VA/examples/run_og_va.py script will be kept up to date to run with the master branch of this repo.

Core Maintainers

The core maintainers of the OG-VA repository are:

• Richard W. Evans (GitHub handle: rickecon), Senior Research Fellow and Director of Open Policy, Center for Growth and Opportunity at Utah State University; President, Open Research Group, Inc.; Director, Open Source Economics Laboratory
• Jason DeBacker (GitHub handle: jdebacker), Associate Professor, Department of Economics, Darla Moore School of Business, University of South Carolina; President, PSL Foundation; Vice President of Research and Co-founder, Open Research Group, Inc.

Citing OG-VA

OG-VA (Version 0.0.0)[Source code], https://github.com/TheCGO/OG-VA