In a world of high capital mobility, the threat of speculative attack becomes a central issue of macroeconomic policy. While “first-generation” and “second-generation” models of speculative attacks both have considerable relevance to particular financial crises of the 1990s, a “third-generation” model is needed to make sense of the number and nature of the emerging market crises of 1997–98. Mos...

Speculative execution techniques have been a cornerstone of modern processors to improve instruction-level parallelism. However, recent studies showed that this kind could be exploited by attackers leak secret data via transient attacks, such as Spectre. Many defenses are proposed address problem, but they all face various challenges: (1) Tracking flow in the instruction pipeline comprehensivel...

Based on the experience of the Portuguese and Spanish financial crises in the early 1990s, this paper suggests that the spillover of exchange rate crises may reveal a particular dimension of the financial contagion effect: the presumption of mimetic behaviour by monetary authorities. This paper analyses the evolution of the credibility of the Escudo and the Peseta. We set out to test the existe...

Whenever modern CPUs encounter a conditional branch for which the condition cannot be evaluated yet, they predict the likely branch target and speculatively execute code. Such pipelining is key to optimizing runtime performance and is incorporated in CPUs for more than 15 years. In this paper, to the best of our knowledge, we are the first to study the inner workings and the security implicatio...

Speculative Attacks are a coordination game with multiple equilibria: If a sufficient number of traders expect devaluation, market pressure forces the central bank to abandon a currency peg that it would have kept otherwise. Thus, expectations are self-fulfilling. Applying the global games approach, Morris and Shin (1998) have shown that there is a unique equilibrium in threshold strategies, if...