The art of central banks' forward guidance at the zero lower bound

This paper proposes to assess the usefulness of central banks forward guidance since the start of the global economic crisis. Using a novel approach, the Wordscores methodology, we reveal that since 2009, central banks do provide a temporal guidance of their accommodative policy that can be relied on and expected. Central banks communication thus gives important insights to financial markets about the persistence of their unconventional measures and in particular about the occurrence of an exit strategy.