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We study the welfare effects of international monetary policy spillovers at the zero lower bound, focusing on the effects of forward guidance in a large economy (“foreign”) on its smaller trading partner (“home”) in scenarios motivated by the global financial crisis. We find that foreign forward guidance has an overall prosper‐thy‐neighbor effect on the home economy as long as it increases foreign welfare. This finding holds under alternative assumptions about exchange rate pass‐through or the degree of international financial integration. However, foreign forward guidance may worsen the trade‐off between the stabilization objectives of home monetary policy.

We develop a general method for analyzing the effects of macroeconomic policy promises about which the private sector is uncertain. We illustrate the method in two applications to a central bank’s ‘forward guidance’ about the path for its policy rate. We demonstrate that uncertainty about forward guidance resulting from its potential to be imperfectly credible makes it much less powerful than in textbook models. In an application to the FOMC’s ‘threshold-based’ guidance, we show that increasing the precision of the conditions under which the policy rate ‘lifts off’ from the zero bound requires a lower unemployment threshold to deliver a given amount of stimulus.