This paper explores the role played by government guarantees to banks’ foreign creditors as a root cause of self-fulfilling twin banking-currency crises. We develop a general equilibrium model in which such guarantees lead to these types of crises. Absent government guarantees, such crises are not possible. The model has three key properties. First, in the presence of government guarantees bank...

Portfolio optimisation typically aims to provide an optimal allocation that minimises risk, at a given return target, by diversifying over different investments. However, the potential scope of such risk diversification can be limited if investments are concentrated in only one country, or more specifically one currency. Multi-currency portfolio is an alternative to achieve higher returns and m...

This paper explains a currency crisis as an outcome of a switch in how monetary policy and fiscal policy are coordinated. The paper develops a model of an open economy in which monetary policy starts active, fiscal policy starts passive and, in a particular state of nature, monetary policy switches to passive and fiscal policy switches to active. The probability of the regime switch is endogeno...

Since financial derivatives are key instruments for risk taking as well as risk reduction, it is only straightforward to examine their role in currency crises. This paper addresses this issue by investigating the impact of currency futures trading on the underlying exchange rates. After a discussion of trading mechanisms and trader types, the linkage between futures trading activity and spot ma...

Why do firms and banks hold foreign currency denominated liabilities? In this paper, we argue that foreign currency debt, by altering the effect of a devaluation on output, has a disciplining effect when the Central Bank’s objectives differ from the social optimum. However, under imperfect information, bad priors about the Central Bank induce excess dollarization of liabilities, which in turn l...

In this position paper we propose a novel trading paradigm for buying and selling locally produced energy in the smart grid. Unlike recently proposed techniques that rely on predictions and a day-ahead market, here prosumers are billed by the distribute system operator according to their actual usage and rewarded based on their actual energy input, similar to the current state of affairs. Our m...

This paper analyses predictions of a simple model of currency crises in which the peg will be abandoned when the currency overvaluation hits a certain threshold, unknown to the agents. Due to learning about the threshold, some features usually observed in the data and identified with models with multiple equilibria arise in the model. But the model yields distinctive predictions about the behav...

This paper is a pioneering attempt to include India with east and Southeast Asia to study the existence of the economic criteria for a common currency. The analysis in this paper shows that significant complementarities in trade exist among these countries, most of them experience similar shocks and labor mobility is already present. These results point to the fact that the cost of adopting a s...

A cash-in-advance model in which the cost of buying goods with a foreign currency is decreasing in the economy’s accumulated experience in transacting in the foreign currency is shown to display hysteresis in money velocity; that is, a temporary increase in expected in ation can cause a permanent increase in velocity. In addition, the model implies that the domestic currency does not have to do...