This paper is concerned with the fact that the incidence of speculative attacks tends to be temporally correlated; that is, currency crises appear to pass contagiously from one country to another. The paper provides a survey of the theoretical literature, and analyzes the contagious nature of...

This paper develops a stochastic equilibrium model of an open economy incorporating speculation in the forward exchange market. The model is used to examine two issues. The first is the role of speculation in stabilizing the economy against stochastic disturbances. Much risk averse speculation...

In the 1990s, currency crises in Europe, Mexico and Southeast Asia have drawn worldwide attention to speculative attacks on government-controlled exchange rates. To improve our understanding of these events, researchers have undertaken new theoretical and empirical work. In this paper, we...

This paper analyzes the sustainability of fixed exchange rates by extending the Barro-Gordon framework to a fully dynamic context in which the level of a state variable (in this case debt) determines the payoffs available to the government at each point in time. The model yields the following...

We develop a modified understand better the 1994 Mexican peso crisis as well as aspects of the European currency crises in 1992-93. We introduce the assumption that the speculative attack is sterilized by the domestic monetary authority, we incorporate a stochastic risk premium, and we allow for...

Persistent differences in interest rates across countries account for much of the profitability of currency carry trade strategies. "Commodity currencies'' tend to have high interest rates while low interest rate currencies belong to exporters of finished goods. This pattern arises in a...

We argue that allowing for the possibility of a self-fulfilling panic helps in understanding several features of the recent Mexican crisis. Self-fulfilling expectations became decisive in generating a panic only after the government ran down gross reserves and ran up short-term dollar debt. We...

There is reliable evidence that simple rules used by traders have some predictive value over the future movement of foreign exchange prices. This paper will review some of this evidence and discuss the economic magnitude of this predictability. The profitability of these trading rules will then...