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Simple Macroeconomic Policies and Welfare: A Quantitative Assessment* * The authors acknowledge financial support from the Brazilian Council of Science and Technology (CNPq) and the helpful comments of an anonymous referee. The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as representing the positions of the Central Bank of Brazil.

We quantitatively compare three macroeconomic policies in a cash-credit goods framework. The policies are: the optimal one; another one that fully smoothes out oscillations in output; and a simple one that prescribes constant values for tax and monetary growth rates. As often found in the related literature, the welfare gains or losses from changing from a given policy to another are small. We also show that the simple policy dominates the one that leads to constant output.

Optimal Policy; Business Cycles; Welfare


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