Revisiting Bank of Japan’s Policy Duration Commitment: Impact, Consequences and Challenges

Forward guidance or more specifically policy duration commitment invented and developed by the Bank of Japan has become an essential part of unconventional monetary policy instruments employed by modern central banks. This paper’s simple empirical analysis finds that the market believes or perceives Bank of Japan’s policy duration commitment to be credible, which has in turn helped the Bank to manage expectations of future interest rates and control the level and shape of the yield curve at an extraordinarily low range. The suppressed yield curve has contributed to reduction of financing costs for businesses and households and has supported macroeconomic growth through the conventional interest rate channel of policy transmission. However, forward guidance including policy duration commitment does have difficulties. The magnitude of its impact has been time-variant, which appears to depend on evolution in policy frameworks and communication skills. More importantly, this paper projects that the extraordinarily low and flattened yield curve coupled with maturity extension of the Bank assets could pose threats to the future income of the central bank in the event of policy normalization, which could have unintended fiscal implications.