Max Ghenis
Building open-source tools that help people understand how policy affects their lives and their communities.
Current work
PolicyEngine
Open source software to simulate tax and benefit policies in the US and UK. Our tools help policymakers, researchers, and the public understand how reforms affect households and society.
Visit policyengine.orgRecent writing
A year of ChatGPT is a fifth of a beer
I built an interactive that prices drinks in AI queries — and lets you flip every assumption that makes published AI water numbers differ by 100x.
Read moreMacKenzie Scott's giving, in QALYs
An interactive cost-effectiveness model for MacKenzie Scott's $26B in philanthropy — and the AI prompts that built it.
Read moreThe US government is gutting Anthropic's R&D capacity
A Commerce export control pulled Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5 on Friday. It's cutting roughly a third of Anthropic's own researchers off from the frontier models they build, while every competitor's keep theirs.
Read moreSide projects
Academic research
What can LLMs tell us about the ETI?
With Jason DeBacker. How LLMs perceive behavioral responses to tax policy.
Beer Price Controls at Yankee Stadium
Economic analysis of stadium pricing, externalities, and welfare.
AI Model Policy Impact Forecasts
Examining LLMs for forecasting policy outcomes under different administrations.
Enhancing Survey Microdata with Administrative Records
Novel approach to microsimulation dataset construction. Presented at NTA 2024.