The relationship of stock returns and trading volume is the focus of much recent interest. I examine an economic model of a rational trader who operates in a market with transactions costs and noise trading. The level of trading affects the rational trader’s marginal cost of transacting; as a...

Recent developments in financial economics have included many explorations into market microstructure, that is, the internal functioning of markets and the ways in which they provide liquidity to traders. An important contribution of this literature is that prices can deviate from their...

This paper takes the Asian crisis as an example to show that the Autoregressive Conditional Hazard (ACH) model is a powerful tool for studying the time series features of speculative attacks. The ACH model proposes a duration variable to capture the changes in the frequency of attacks, which...

Bolivia has achieved noteworthy success over the past 15 years in raising incomes, reducing poverty, and maintaining macroeconomic stability by deploying commodity revenues to finance transfers, public investment, and state-led development, using an exchange rate peg as a policy anchor. However,...

The paper shows that changing market beliefs about currency risk can generate a self-fulfilling speculative attack on a fixed exchange rate. The attack does not require a later change in policies to make it profitable. This is illustrated by introducing an endogenous risk premium into a...

We present a model of a “soft” exchange rate target zone and interpret it as a stylized description of the post-August 1993 ERM. Our central bank targets a moving average of the current and past exchange rates, rather than the exchange rate’s current level, thus allowing the rate to move...

After the speculative attacks on government-controlled exchange rates in Europe and in Mexico, economists began to develop models of currency crises with multiple solutions. In these models, a currency crisis occurs when the economy suddenly jumps from one solution to another. This paper...

In the 1990s, currency crises in Europe, Mexico, and Asia have drawn worldwide attention to speculative attacks on government-controlled exchange rates and have prompted researchers to undertake new theoretical and empirical analysis of these events. This paper provides some perspective on this...

The answer seems affirmative. We compare currency carry trades with an investment strategy based on currency fundamentals: taking a long (short) position in undervalued (overvalued) currencies. Carry trades have high risk-adjusted returns, but are subject to ""crash risk."" In contrast, the...

We introduce local and foreign investors in a simple model of speculative attacks. Local investors have less tolerance for overvaluation of the fixed exchange rate because they tend to incur lower costs when taking a short position and possess better information, and because of moral hazard...