Reactions of US government bond yields to explicit FOMC forward guidance

• We quantify the impact of explicit FOMC forward guidance on government bond yields.
• Open-ended and time-contingent forward guidance announcements reduced bond yields.
• Forward guidance announcements containing state-contingency increased bond yields.

We quantify the effect of explicit policy rate guidance by the FOMC at the zero lower bound of the policy rate on US government bond yields with maturities up to 10 years. We distinguish between different kinds of announcements, namely open-ended and time-contingent forward guidance announcements, and forward guidance announcements containing state-contingency. We find that open-ended and time-contingent forward guidance announcements led to a significant reduction in forward US Treasury yields at a wide range of horizons, with the largest reduction occurring at the 5-year ahead horizon for both kinds of announcements. By contrast, forward guidance announcements containing state-contingency led to a significant increase in forward US Treasury yields for horizons of 3–7 years ahead; this increase could however be due to associated asset purchase announcements.