Negative interest rates remain a controversial policy for central banks. We study a novel signalling channel and ask under what conditions negative rates should exist in an optimal policymaker’s toolkit. We prove two necessary conditions for the optimality of negative rates: a time-consistent...

This paper presents a toolkit1 for generating optimal policy projections. It makes five contributions. First, the toolkit requires a minimal set of inputs: only a baseline projection for target and instrument variables and impulse responses of those variables to policy shocks. Second, it solves...

This paper develops a simple, consistent methodology for generating empirically realistic forward guidance simulations using existing macroeconomic models by modifying expectations about policy announcements. The main advantage of our method lies in the exact preservation of all other shock...

We estimate the effects of interest rate forward guidance (FG) using a parsimonious VAR, augmented with survey forecast data. The identification strategy of FG shocks via sign and zero restrictions is successfully tested by the recovery of true IRFs from simulated data. The identified shocks...