Government Guarantees, Investment, and Vulnerability to Financial Crises

The paper presents a new model of the East Asian crisis which combines three elements-moral hazard, investment collapse, and multiple equilibria-in a single account. The study locates the causes of the crisis in poor financial regulation, highly leveraged financial institutions, and implicit guarantees to the financial sector. The model has a unique long-run equilibrium with overinvestment. But in the short run, in which the capital stock is fixed, there may be multiple equilibria. In a crisis the government is forced to renege on its guarantees; the effect is a rapid reversal of foreign capital flows. Copyright Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2003.