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Indicators of financial crisis generally do not have a good track record. This paper presents an early warning system for six countries in Asia, in which indicators do work. We distinguish three types of financial crises, currency crises, banking crises and debt crises, and extract four groups of indicators from the literature-external, financial, domestic (real and public), and global indicators-that are likely to affect the probability of financial crises. The significance of the indicator groups is tested in a multivariate logit model on a panel of six Asian countries for the period 1970:01-2001:12. An additional feature is that we examine four different currency crisis dating definitions. A within-sample signal extraction experiment reveals that some currency crises dating schemes outperform others.

It is sometimes argued that news reports in the media suffer from biased reporting. Mullainathan and Shleifer (2002, 2004) argue that there are two types of media bias. One bias, called ideology, reflects a news outlet's desire to affect reader opinions in a particular direction. The second bias, referred to as 'spin' or 'slanting', reflects the outlet's attempt to simply create a memorable story. Competition between outlets can eliminate the effect of ideological bias, but increases the incentive to spin or slant stories. We examine whether we find some evidence of spin in Dutch newspaper reporting on the state of the economy. If newspapers are indeed able to create memorable stories this should, according to our hypothesis, affect the opinion of readers with respect to the state of the economy. Sentiments about the actual state of the economy could be magnified by spin. As a result, consumer confidence can be expected to be affected not only by economic fundamentals, but also by the way these fundamentals are reported. We construct a variable that reflects the way consumers perceive economic news reported in newspapers. We find that this variable indeed has a significant impact on consumer confidence

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