It is often argued that the provision of liquidity by the international institutions such as the IMF to countries experiencing balance of payment problems can have catalytic effects on the behavior of international financial markets, i.e., it can reduce the scale of liquidity runs by inducing investors to roll over their financial claims to the country. Critics point out that official lending also causes moral hazard distortions: expecting to be bailed out by the IMF, debtor countries have weak incentives to implement good but costly policies, thus raising the probability of a crisis. This paper presents an analytical framework to study the trade-off between official liquidity provision and debtor moral hazard. In our model international financial crises are caused by the interaction of bad fundamentals, self-fulfilling runs and policies by three classes of optimizing agents: international investors, the local government and the IMF. We show how an international financial institution helps prevent liquidity runs via coordination of agents' expectations, by raising the number of investors willing to lend to the country for any given level of the fundamental. We show that the influence of such an institution is increasing in the size of its interventions and the precision of its information: more liquidity support and better information make agents more willing to roll over their debt and reduces the probability of a crisis. Different from the conventional view stressing debtor moral hazard, we show that official lending may actually strengthen a government incentive to implement desirable but costly policies. By worsening the expected return on these policies, destructive liquidity runs may well discourage governments from undertaking them, unless they can count on contingent liquidity assistance.

A striking fact about pricing is the prevalence of "sales": large temporary price cuts followed by prices returning exactly to their former levels. This paper builds a macroeconomic model with a rationale for sales based on firms facing customers with different price sensitivities.Even if firms can adjust sales without cost, monetary policy has large real effects owing to sales being strategic substitutes: a firm's incentive to have a sale is decreasing in the number of other firms having sales. Thus the flexibility seen in individual prices due to sales does not translate into flexibility of the aggregate price level.JEL classifications: E3; E5.

It is often argued that the provision of liquidity by the international institutions such as the IMF to countries experiencing balance of payment problems can have catalytic effects on the behavior of international financial markets, i.e., it can reduce the scale of liquidity runs by inducing investors to roll over their financial claims to the country. Critics point out that official lending also causes moral hazard distortions: expecting to be bailed out by the IMF, debtor countries have weak incentives to implement good but costly policies, thus raising the probability of a crisis. This paper presents an analytical framework to study the trade-off between official liquidity provision and debtor moral hazard. In our model international financial crises are caused by the interaction of bad fundamentals, self-fulfilling runs and policies by three classes of optimizing agents: international investors, the local government and the IMF. We show how an international financial institution helps prevent liquidity runs via coordination of agents' expectations, by raising the number of investors willing to lend to the country for any given level of the fundamental. We show that the influence of such an institution is increasing in the size of its interventions and the precision of its information: more liquidity support and better information make agents more willing to roll over their debt and reduces the probability of a crisis. Different from the conventional view stressing debtor moral hazard, we show that official lending may actually strengthen a government incentive to implement desirable but costly policies. By worsening the expected return on these policies, destructive liquidity runs may well discourage governments from undertaking them, unless they can count on contingent liquidity assistance.

Market participants' risk attitudes, wealth and portfolio composition influence their positions in a pegged foreign currency and, therefore, may have important effects on the sustainability of currency pegs. We analyze such effects in a global game model of currency crises with continuous action choices, generating a rich set of theoretical comparative static predictions related to often discussed but rarely modelled accounts of the onset and timing of currency crises. The model can be solved in closed form and the methods could be used to study other economic issues in which coordination and risk aversion play important roles.

No abstract