Package: cost-of-capital-calculator
Cost-of-Capital-CalculatorCost-of-Capital-Calculator is a model that can be used to evaluate the effect of US federal taxes on the investment incentives of corporate and non-corporate businesses.  Specifically, Cost-of-Capital-Calculator uses data on the business assets and financial policy, as well as microdata on individual tax filers, to compute marginal effective tax rates on new investments.  In modeling the effects of changes to the individual income tax code, Cost-of-Capital-Calculator works withTax-Calculator, another open-source model of US federal tax policy.  Cost-of-Capital-Calculator is written in Python, an interpreted language that can execute on Windows, Mac, or Linux.InstallationThecccpackage can be installed with Anaconda via:conda install -c conda-forge cccor with PyPI via:pip install cost-of-capital-calculatorWeb ApplicationCost-of-Capital-Calculator is available through a web
application,Cost of Capital Calculator.  This app
allows you to generate estimates of marginal effective tax rates and the cost of capital
across production industries, type of asset, and separately for corporate and non-corporate
entities and different forms of financing.  The web application is limited in that you cannot consider policy reforms to the individual income tax code.Contributing to Cost-of-Capital-CalculatorTo contribute to Cost-of-Capital-Calculator, you'll want to clone the GitHub repository to your own machine, where you can work with and edit the source code. To do this, follow the following instructions:Install theAnaconda distributionof PythonClone this repository to a directory on your computerFrom the terminal (or Conda command prompt), navigate to the directory to which you cloned this repository and runconda env create -f environment.ymlThen,conda activate ccc-devRun the model with an example reform from terminal/command prompt by typingpython example.pyYou can adjust theexample.pyby adjusting the individual income tax reform (using a dictionary or JSON file in a format that is consistent withTax Calculator) or other model parameters specified in thebusiness_tax_adjustmentsdictionary.Model outputs will be saved in the following files:./baseline_byasset.csvCost of capital, marginal effective tax rates, effective average tax rates, and other model output for the baseline policy, organized by asset../baseline_byindustry.csvCost of capital, marginal effective tax rates, effective average tax rates, and other model output for the baseline policy, organized by production industry../reform_byasset.csvCost of capital, marginal effective tax rates, effective average tax rates, and other model output for the reform policy, organized by asset../reform_byindustry.csvCost of capital, marginal effective tax rates, effective average tax rates, and other model output for the refrom policy, organized by production industry../changed_byasset.csvDifferences in cost of capital, marginal effective tax rates, effective average tax rates, and other model output between the baseline and reform reform policies, organized by asset../changed_byindustry.csvDifferences in cost of capital, marginal effective tax rates, effective average tax rates, and other model output between the baseline and reform reform policies, organized by production industry.The CSV output files can be compared to the./example_output/*_expected.csvfiles that are checked into the repository to confirm that you are generating the expected output.  The easiest way to do this is to use the./example-diffscommand (orexample-diffson Windows).  If you run into errors running the example script, please open a new issue in the Cost-of-Capital-Calculator repo with a description of the issue and any relevant tracebacks you receive.DisclaimerResults will change as the underlying models improve. A fundamental reason for adopting open source methods in this project is so that people from all backgrounds can contribute to the models that our society uses to assess economic policy; when community-contributed improvements are incorporated, the model will produce different results.Citing the Cost-of-Capital-Calculator ModelCost-of-Capital-Calculator (Version 1.2.11)[Source code],https://github.com/PSLmodels/Cost-of-Capital-Calculator