To check hyperinflation, Argentina pegged the peso at one US dollar in 1991. This stopped inflation in its tracks: but, with the rise of the dollar against the Euro and the substantial devaluation of the Brazilian real, the peso became increasingly over-valued leading to a significant...

This paper studies sharp reductions in current account deficits and large exchange rate depreciations in low- and middle-income countries. It examines which factors help predict the occurrence of a reversal or a currency crisis, and how these events affect macroeconomic performance. It finds...

This paper presents a simple model of currency crises, which is driven by the interplay between the credit constraints of private domestic firms and the existence of nominal price rigidities. The possibility of multiple equilibria, including a ‘currency crisis’ equilibrium with low output...

This Paper proposes a new framework for interpreting a currency crisis associated with a fiscal imbalance, which we find appropriate for the analysis of contemporary economies with outstanding public debt. Unlike the first-generation literature on speculative attacks, we do not assume that money...

We pursue the idea that a region presents a common ‘prospectus’ to investors and lenders. Specifically, we explore whether investors respond to regional developments, rather than to country-specific fundamentals. Such behaviour may be appropriate where regions are identified by common...

This paper studies the role of unemployment in sterling’s inter-war experience. According to most narrative accounts, the proximate cause of the 1931 sterling crisis was a high and rising unemployment rate that placed pressure on British governments to pursue reflationary policies. We present...

The swiftness and devastating impact of recent financial crises have taken many market participants by surprise and pose challenges for economists seeking a theory of the onset of a crisis. We propose such a theory based on two features. The actions of diverse economic actors which undermine the...

Exploiting the Japanese banking crisis as a laboratory, we provide firm-level evidence on the real effects of bank bailouts. Government recapitalizations result in positive abnormal returns for the clients of recapitalized banks. After recapitalizations, banks extend larger loans to their...

There is a lively debate on the persistence of the current banking crisis' impact on GDP. Impulse Response Functions (IRF) estimated by Cerra and Saxena (2008) suggest that the effects of earlier crises were long-lasting. We show that standard estimates of IRFs are highly sensitive to...

In this paper, we introduce a new requirement for bank capital: banking-on-the-average rules. Under these rules a bank’s required level of equity capital is monotonically increasing in the realized equity capital of its peers. In a simple model we illustrate the workings of...