There has been a long debate about whether speculators are stabilizing or not.We consider a model where speculators have a stabilizing role in normal times,but may also provoke large risk panics. The very feature that makes arbitrageursliquidity providers in normal times, namely their tolerance...

Recent crises have seen very large spikes in asset price risk without dramatic shiftsin fundamentals. We propose an explanation for these risk panics based on selffullling shifts in risk made possible by a negative link between the current assetprice and risk about the future asset price. This...

In an in‡uential series of contributions, Kraay and Ventura (2000, 2003) o¤er a“new rule” for the current account: in response to a temporary income shock, thechange in the current account is equal to the change in saving times the ratio of netforeign assets to wealth. We analyze the...

We develop a new theory of international capital flows based on dispersed in-formation across individual investors. There is extensive evidence of informationheterogeneity within and across countries, which has proven critical to under-standing asset price behavior. We introduce information...

Recent research has shown that relaxing the assumptions of complete informationand common knowledge in exchange rate models can shed light on a wide range ofimportant exchange rate puzzles. In this chapter, we review a number of models wehave developed in previous work that relax the strong...

It is well known from anecdotal, survey and econometric evidence that the relationshipbetween the exchange rate and macro fundamentals is highly unstable. Thiscould be explained when structural parameters are known and very volatile, neitherof which seems plausible. Instead we argue that large...

The use of different currencies in the invoicing of international trade transactions plays a major role in the international transmission of economic fluctuations. Existing studies argue that an exporter’s invoicing choice reflects structural aspects of her industry, such as market share and...

Motivated by the Chinese experience, we analyze a semi-open economy where the centralbank has access to international capital markets, but the private sector has not. Thisenables the central bank to choose an interest rate different from the international rate.We examine the optimal policy of...

In the recent decade, capital outows from emerging economies, in the form of a demandfor liquid assets, have played a key role in the context of global imbalances. In this paper,we model the demand for liquid assets by rms in a dynamic open-economy macroeconomicmodel. We nd that the implications...