Economic Flexibility in Microsimulation: An Age-Centered Regression Approach: Working Paper 2007-02

This paper describes a strategy for estimating predictive equations that has been shown to work well in microsimulation modeling. The technique, referred to here as “age-centered regression,” is particularly useful when the available data set for estimating a model equation is limited and the marginal effect of one or more explanatory variables might be expected to vary systematically by age. The examples used here to describe how age-centering works are taken from the labor supply equations in the Congressional Budget Office Long-Term (CBOLT) dynamic microsimulation model. By switching from