Fiscal and Monetary Policies in an Agent-Based Model

In this paper, we aim to assess the impacts of using monetary policies and fiscal transfers on the economy using an agent-based model. The model used is based on the original model developed by Ashraf et al. (2017), where agents endogenously develop trading networks of goods and labor, to study the impacts of the banking sector, and extended by Popoyan et al. (2017) to include different policy rate rules and macroprudential policy. We evaluate different fiscal policies and their interactions with monetary policy on how the economy performs based on aggregates such as total output and inflation, as well as based on granular data such as the wealth and consumption of the agents at specific percentiles. The findings are that consumption-based policies are best for reducing the aggregate effects on GDP, targeted policies are efficient if the government's goal is to help a specific group, and unconditional transfers are the least efficient of the three. In addition, we analyze the effects of implementing monetary and fiscal policies synchronously after a COVID-19-like crisis, and we do not find conclusive evidence that combining the two policies are better than the sum of the individual effects, but it is likely to be necessary to do both in order to get the economy back to its original path in a timely manner.