Reputation for Confidence

We model how a central bank communicates its noisy forecasts (forward guidance) while taking into account its own uncertainty (confidence) and the public’s perception of the bank’s uncertainty (reputation for confidence). This creates a mismatch between the public and central bank’s interpretation of the bank announcement which induces the bank to communicate with partial transparency and deliberate imprecision. Moreover, with higher confidence (lower reputation) announcements are more precise. With text data from internal Fed documents and newspapers, we find communication patterns are largely consistent with the model except the Fed’s communication strategy underreacts to reputation compared to the model.