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When the Federal Reserve provides greater clarity about the path of future interest rates, term premia in longer-term bonds fall and economic activity increases. This interest rate uncertainty channel of forward guidance sheds light on three important issues in macroeconomics. First, this channel explains how forward guidance shapes term premia, both away from and at the zero lower bound. Second, our mechanism offers a novel explanation for the puzzling fact that monetary policy announcements affect distant real forward rates. Finally, we show that event studies overstate the effects of large-scale asset purchases when they fail to control for simultaneous forward guidance.

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This paper studies the transmission of Federal Reserve communication to financial markets and the economy using new measures of the term structure of policy rate uncertainty. Movements in the term structure of interest rate uncertainty around FOMC announcements cannot be summarized by a single measure but, instead, are two dimensional. We characterize these two dimensions as the level and slope factors of the term structure of interest rate uncertainty. These two monetary policy uncertainty factors significantly help to explain changes in Treasury yields and forward real interest rates around FOMC announcements, even after accounting for changes in the expected path of policy rates. Moreover, we demonstrate that focusing in just a single dimension of monetary policy uncertainty provides an inaccurate description of how policy uncertainty shapes the transmission of FOMC announcements. Finally, our policy uncertainty factors provide stronger first-stage instruments in a proxy SVAR setting, which implies more expansionary macroeconomic effects of forward guidance than those estimated only using the expected path of policy rates.