Expectations and Information in Second Generation Currency Crises Models.

We explore the role of expectations in second generation currency crisis models, proving that sudden shifts in speculators' beliefs can trigger currency devaluations, even without any sizable worsening in the fundamentals. In our incomplete information game, mean-preserving changes in speculators' expectations may drive agents to a unique equilibrium with a self-ful lling attack. In particular, our model supports the thesis that ,sincea suf ciently large increase in speculators' uncertainty over the fundamentals is likely to trigger a currency crisis.