Tax reforms vs benefit enhancement to address mental health inequalities: a microsimulation study

Overview

The analysis has three distinct stages:

1. Create policy scenarios using EUROMOD (requires Windows)
2. Run SimPaths model for each scenario and process output data (computationally intensive)
3. Analyse and visualise outputs

Each step can be run in a different environment, as long as outputs from the previous step are copied into the right directory in the new environment (see detailed information below). Originally, stages 1 and 3 were run on a Windows laptop, while stage 2 was run on an HPC cluster.

Stage 1: Create policy scenarios using EUROMOD

Requires:

• Python
• Input data:
  • data/euromod_input/UK_2020_b1.txt: Input microdata for the UKMOD model. Must be requested from the UKMOD team at: https://www.microsimulation.ac.uk/ukmod/access/frs/
  • data/euromod_input/UKMOD-PUBLIC-B2025.08: The UKMOD model, version B2025.08. Can be downloaded here (direct link). Extract the zip file in the data/euromod_input folder.

How to run:

1. Create and activate a Python virtual environment:

   python -m venv euromod_env euromod_env/Scripts/activate

2. Install Python dependencies:

   pip install -r requirements.txt

3. Run the script:

   python scripts/01_create_euromod_output.py

Stage 2: Run SimPaths

Install R dependencies:

Rscript -e "renv::restore()"

Stage 3: Analyse outputs