Cel In a future book on international economic history, the nineties will probably be called "the decade of cuaency crises." The series of cases of the European Monetary System in 1992-1993, the Mexican crisis in 1995, the Asian crises and the Czech koruna turbulence in 1997, the Russian and Brazilian crises in 1998 all prove that countries do not have the appropriate monetary system for the extremely fast capital movements in the World. The crisis of the Exchange Rate Mechanism in Europe destroyed the illusion that only the countries with serious macroeconomic imbalances have to face the ask of speculative attacks. It became clear that macroeconomic theory did not know enough about the mechanisms which may trigger a currency crisis. Since then, a lot of work has been done in this field. A group of new theories found that mechanisms based on the expectations of the speculators could lead to self- fulfilling currency crises. Other models showed that simple changes in the assumptions about the informational structure of the speculators could radically change the outcome. In this paper, I argue that an important element of speculative attacks missing from the currency crisis literature. This element is the rational herding behavior of the speculators. I build a model that shows that herding effects may cause currency crises even in economies with sound macroeconomic indicators. I argue that the fixed exchange rate constrains the information revealing capability of the exchange rate and it may cause a speculative attack. It may happen that all the speculators join the attacking herd, believing that others have private intormation showing that the attack will be profitable, although the majority of them have private intonation showing the contrary. I prove that this model can explain a strange empirical phenomenon after certain European speculative crises. Apparently there is a group of- currency crises (e.g. the crises of the French and Belgian, the Dani Dziedzina nauki social scienceseconomics and businesseconomicsmacroeconomicshumanitieshistory and archaeologyhistorysocial scienceseconomics and businesseconomicsmonetary and finances Program(-y) FP5-HUMAN POTENTIAL - Programme for research, technological development and demonstration on "Improving the human research potential and the socio-economic knowledge base" (1998-2002) Temat(-y) Data not available Zaproszenie do składania wniosków Data not available System finansowania ACM - Preparatory, accompanying and support measures Koordynator PETER KONDOR Wkład UE Brak danych Adres Egry Jozsef u. 32 1111 BUDAPEST Węgry Zobacz na mapie Koszt całkowity Brak danych
