The paper explores the role of expectations in second generation currency crises models, providing an explanation for sudden shifts in speculators' behaviour that trigger currency devaluations, even without any sizeable worsening of the fundamentals of the economy. By focusing on expectations, we show that 'small' (mean-preserving) changes of speculators' probability assessment over the state of fundamentals may be sufficient to drive agents on a unique 'bad' equilibrium with a self-fulfilling attack that forces the government to devaluate the currency. Following a recent line of research, we also examine the role of information and that of common knowledge of agents' actions for the result of multiple equilibria. Unlike private information models, that entail a unique equilibrium for each level of the fundamentals, public information games, by restoring the common knowledge of players' actions, maintain multiple equilibria. Interestingly, by comparing the results of the two models, the following paradox emerges: providing public information seems to be more convenient when fundamentals are bad. An inspection on the reasons behind this paradox gives an illustration of how misleading conclusions might be when drawn from models with multiple equilibria, especially when considerations on the likelihood of the outcomes are neglected.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Carlsson, Hans & van Damme, Eric, 1993.
"Global Games and Equilibrium Selection,"
Econometrica,
Econometric Society, vol. 61(5), pages 989-1018, September.
[Downloadable!] (restricted)
Other versions:
Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)