We ask whether uncertainty about interest rates is important for economic activity. Effects of interest rate uncertainty on the economy are examined through the lens of a small VAR where the assumption that uncertainty can affect real activity contemporaneously but not vice versa is indeed in line with the data. Our measure of uncertainty stems from professional forecasts of short-and long-term interest rates and accounts for both disagreement among forecasters and the perceived variability of future aggregate shocks. Studying a panel of countries we find that subjective interest rate uncertainty has large, negative and persistent effects on the economy.

We quantify the macroeconomic effects of the European Central Bank's unconventional monetary policies using a DSGE model which includes a set of shadow interest rates. Extracted from the yield curve, these shadow rates provide unconstrained measures of the overall stance of monetary policy. Counterfactual analyses show that, without unconventional measures, the euro area would have suffered (i) a substantial loss of output since the Great Recession and (ii) a period of deflation from mid-2015 to early 2017. Specifically, year-on-year inflation and GDP growth would have been on average about 0.61% and 1.09% below their actual levels over the period 2014Q1-2017Q2, respectively.

Summary We estimate time‐varying national natural real rates of interest (r∗) for the four largest economies of the euro area over 1999–2016. We further derive the associated national real interest rate gaps, which gauge the perceived monetary policy stance in each country. We find that the average r∗ have been lower after 2008. Furthermore, national r∗ were significantly negative in southern countries during the sovereign crisis. As their effective real rates soared, national rate gaps across the euro area diverged. However, a common policy stance has been restored since 2014 as the European Central Bank's unconventional programs gathered pace.

Summary This paper employs a zero lower bound (ZLB) consistent shadow‐rate model to decompose UK nominal yields into expectation and term premium components. Compared to a standard affine term structure model, it performs relatively better in a ZLB setting by capturing the stylized facts of the yield curve. The ZLB model is then exploited to estimate inflation expectations and risk premiums. This entails jointly pricing and decomposing nominal and real UK yields. We find evidence that medium‐ and long‐term inflation expectations are contained within narrower bounds since the early 1990s, suggesting monetary policy credibility improved after the introduction of inflation targeting.

We use several U.S. and euro‐area surveys of professional forecasters to estimate a dynamic factor model of inflation featuring time‐varying uncertainty. We obtain survey‐consistent distributions of future inflation at any horizon, both in the U.S. and the euro area. Equipped with this model, we propose a novel measure of the anchoring of inflation expectations that accounts for inflation uncertainty. Our results suggest that following the Great Recession, inflation anchoring improved in the United States, while mild de‐anchoring occurred in the euro area. As of our sample end, both areas appear to be almost equally anchored.