We argue that allowing for the possibility of a self-fulfilling panic helps in understanding several features of the recent Mexican crisis. Self-fulfilling expectations became decisive in generating a panic only after the government ran down gross reserves and ran up short-term dollar debt. We...

In recent years the conventional wisdom has held that fixed rates provide more fiscal discipline than do flexible rates. In this paper we show that this wisdom need not hold in a standard model in which fiscal policy is endogenously determined by a maximizing fiscal authority. The claim that...

In this paper we examine closely the financial events following the Mexican peso devaluation to uncover new lessons about the nature of financial crises. We explore the question of why, during 1995, some emerging markets were hit by financial crises while others were not. To this end, we ask...

We present a standard intertemporal model in which fiscal policy is determined by an optimizing but non-benevolent fiscal authority. If the fiscal authority is impatient, a money-based stabilization provides more fiscal discipline and higher welfare for the representative agent than does an...