The possibility that movements in market prices of assets or goods may be caused by self-fulfilling prophecies, called bubbles or sunspots, has long intrigued market observers. If bubbles or sunspots exist, market prices differ from their fundamental values, and markets do not necessarily...

This paper develops an open-economy model of the business cycle. Thenominal prices in the model are flexible and monetary nonneutrality isdeveloped using information confusion about the sources of disturbances todemand coupled with differential persistence of demand shocks. Firms useinventories...

Several recent studies have attributed a large part of asset price volatility to self-fulfilling expectations. Such an explanation is unattractive to many since it allows allocations that need bear no particular relation to those implied by the economist's standard kit ofmarket fundamentals. We...

This paper develops an open-economy macroeconomic model which can be used to interpret the observed fluctuations in output, inventories,prices,and exchange rates in the medium-sized economies of the world. The model is consistent with the major empirical regularities that have been discovered in...

Typical evaluations of the choice of exchange rate regime employ a criterion function that depends on the real performance of the economy, and they focus on regimes that are expected to last indefinitely. This latter feature is strongly contradicted by the transitory nature of actual...

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...

The paper develops a general stochastic macroeconomic model which can be used to study the international transmission of disturbances under alternative exchange-rate systems. Four types of exchange-rate systems are considered: uniform flexible exchange rates, uniform fixed exchange rates,...

In this paper we develop a rational expectations exchange rate model which is capable of confronting explicitly agents' beliefs about a future switch in exogenous driving processes. In our set-up the agents know with certainty both the initial exogenous process and the new process to be adopted...

This paper reviews recent developments in the theoretical and empirical analysis of balance-of-payments crises. A simple analytical model highlighting the process leading to such crises is first developed. The basic framework is then extended to deal with a variety of issues, such as:...

The paper considers the merits of rules and discretion for monetary policy when the structure of the macroeconomic model and the probability distributions of disturbances are not well defined. It is argued that when it is costly to delay policy reactions to seldom-experienced shocks until formal...