Confronted with a speculative attack on its currency peg, an authority weighs the short-term benefit of giving in and fine tuning the economy against the long-term benefit of credibility-enhancing resistance. In turn, speculators with heterogeneous beliefs face strategic uncertainty that peaks...

This paper develops an empirical procedure for analyzing the impact of model misspecification and calibration errors on measures of portfolio credit risk. When applied to large simulated portfolios with realistic characteristics, this procedure reveals that violations of key assumptions of the...

Do public policy signals improve the alignment of market outcomes with economic fundamentals? Existing work contends that, when individual players have an incentive to coordinate their actions, public policy signals could steer these actions away from the fundamentals. We argue that such a...

Extending a standard credit-risk model illustrates that a single factor can drive both expected losses and the extent to which they may be exceeded in extreme scenarios, ie “unexpected losses.” This leads us to develop a framework for forecasting these losses jointly. In an application to...

In the late 1990s, Morris and Shin proposed a new theoretical framework of financial crises, which generalised traditional models of strategic complementarity and self-fulfilling beliefs by incorporating idiosyncratic uncertainty about the state. The innovative feature of their framework is...

Could a less conservative central bank - one that faces a more severe time inconsistency problem - be less likely to succumb to an attack on a currency peg? Traditional currency-crisis models provide a firm answer: No. We argue that the answer stems from these models' narrow focus on how a...

In order to analyze the pricing of portfolio credit risk – as revealed by tranche spreads of a popular credit default swap (CDS) index – we extract risk-neutral probabilities of default (PDs) and physical asset return correlations from single-name CDS spreads. The time profile and overall...