Note: taxsim 32 has been obsoleted. It will persist for replications only. Please update to the latest version.

Installation of Taxsim32

The staticly linked taxsim32 AMD64 binary executable file is available at one of these URLs: Download the file and copy it to someplace on your system, perhaps in the default executable path for convenience. You should rename it taxsim32.exe to correspond to the example below but other name changes may cause problems..

Testing

Prepare a simple ASCII test file in csv format - we will call it txpydata.raw: taxsimid,mstat,year,ltcg 1,2,1970,100000 and submit it to taxsim32.exe: taxsim32.exe <txpydata.raw You should receive a 2-line csv file in reply. If not, check the existence and permissions (Linux and OSX) on the executable file.

Format of submissions

taxsim32 expects to read a csv file with taxpayer data. The first row will be the variable names as documented at href="http://www.nber.org/taxsim/taxsim32 and each of the remaining rows corresponds to a tax return.

In addition to the taxpayer characteristic variables, variable mtr

Additional Controls

If the default marginal tax rate calculation or level of detail is not to your liking, it is possible to change either with additiona variables. A

These values of mtr affect the marginal tax calculation are:

These values of idtl affect the output level:

For example descriptive output with several different marginal tax rates:

taxsimid,mstat,year,ltcg,mtr,idtl 1,2,1970,100000,11,5 1,2,1970,100000,70,5 1,2,1970,100000,85,5 1,2,1970,100000,86,5

Problems

The most likely problem is: taxsim32: not found or something similar. Other problems would be non-decimal characters in the data (such as missing value codes) or non-ascii data. Check your data in notepad or similar. If there are data problems, an explicit error message will be output to the standard output and execution will cease.

Source Code

Unlike the programs of professional programmers, taxsim32.for has no dependencies, uses no non-standard libraries and will compile on any computer with a fortran compiler with a single command: gfortran taxsim.for -o taxsim.exe If you need source code I can supply that. taxsim.f does contain one line that requires f90 or better. You can change "f0.0" "i 0" and "f 0 .2" to f14.2 or i10 if you are still at f77.
Last modified 14 Oct 2021 by drf