The LifePaths Microsimulation Model: An Overview

This document gives an overview of LifePaths, a dynamic microsimulation model of Canadian society developed and maintained in Statistics Canada’s Modeling Division. By simulating detailed individual life histories for millions of virtual Canadian residents, LifePaths reproduces the socioeconomic and demographic features of the past half-century and enables detailed projections into the future under alternative assumptions and scenarios. LifePaths is used to analyse government policies having an essentially longitudinal component, like the sustainability of social insurance systems or long-term effects of investments in education. Based on individuals in their family context, it supports distributional analysis in all its dimensions: cross-sectional, over individual lives, between cohorts and over generations.