Private and Public Information in Self-Fulfilling Currency Crises

This paper analyses the implications of information dissemination on currency crises in models with self-fulfilling expectations. Following Morris/Shin (1999, 2000), we introduce noisy private and public information, so that under certain conditions for the noise parameters a unique equilibrium is derived. Comparative statics then show that if the fundamental state of the economy is good, the probability of a currency crisis decreases in the precision of public information, but increases in the precision of private information. In case of bad fundamentals, however, more precise public information increases the likelihood of a crisis, whereas more precise private information leads to a lower crisis probability.