Speculative attacks on fixed or ‘fixed but adjustable’ exchange rate regimes seem to have become a standard feature of the landscape of foreign exchange markets. The supposed excesses of seemingly untethered financial markets have been documented for some time, but only recently...

By using data from the Mexican economy, this paper estimates a speculative attack model of currency crises in order to identify the role of macroeconomic fundamentals and early warning signals of a potential currency crisis. A deterioration in fundamentals appears to generate high one-step-ahead...

A considerable body of theoretical and empirical literature has developed seeking to explain the timing, magnitude, and mechanics of speculative attacks against currencies. This paper extends the empirical specification of the traditional speculative attack model by developing a random...

Currency crises in emerging and developing countries have often been characterized by “sudden stops” of capital flows. A variety of mechanisms have been adduced to explain the emergence of this phenomenon. This paper integrates these mechanisms into a simple and transparent analytical model...

We investigate whether leading indicators of currency crises differ across exchange rate regimes using data for 88 countries in the period 1981–2010. Our estimates suggest that in fixed exchange rate regimes external indicators, such as deviations of the real exchange rate from trend and the...

This paper takes a spatial modelling approach in specifying and testing for contagion among emerging market economies. Our approach enables us to estimate asymmetries such as the magnitude of contagion of one country upon others, as well as how that country in turn is affected, on average, by...

We argue that recent currency crises reflect clashes between fundamentals and pegged exchange rates, just as did crises in the past. We reject the view that crises reflect self-fulfilling prophecies that are not closely related to measured fundamentals. Doubts about the timing of a market attack...

The currency crisis literature has identified two possible types of crisis: fundamentals based crises and self-fulfilling crises. A fundamentals based crisis arises when some state variable, such as foreign exchange reserves, reaches a critical level and triggers the abandonment of the fixed...