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, and other IMF colleagues for helpful comments and input. The paper also benefited from comments and suggestions by a number of home and host supervisory authorities and key private sector representatives of the financial industry. The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors.

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The views expressed in this Working Paper are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent those of the IMF or IMF policy. Working Papers describe research in progress by the author(s) and are published to elicit comments and to further debate.This paper provides evidence on the susceptibility of different types of exchange rate regimes to currency crises during 1990-2001. It explores the incidence of crises, identified as episodes of severe exchange market pressure, to seek evidence on whether pegged regimes are more crisis prone than floating regimes and on whether certain types of pegged regimes are more crisis prone than others. The paper finds that pegged regimes, as a whole, have been characterized by a higher incidence of crises than floating regimes, for countries that are more integrated with international capital markets; and that intermediate regimes (mainly soft pegs and tightly-managed floating regimes) have been more crisis prone than both hard pegs and other floating regimes-a view consistent with the bipolar view of exchange rate regimes. The degree of crisis proneness seems to be broadly similar across different types of intermediate regimes.

By using data from the Mexican economy, this paper estimates a speculative attack model of currency crises in order to identify the role of macroeconomic fundamentals and early warning signals of a potential currency crisis. A deterioration in fundamentals appears to generate high one-step-ahead probabilities for the observed regime changes during the sample period 1982–1994. Particularly, foreign reserve losses, expansionary output, monetary and fiscal policies, an increase in inflation differentials and the share of short-term foreign currency-indexed debt, and an appreciation of the real exchange rate appear to have contributed to the speculative pressures and the associated regime changes. Copyright Kluwer Academic Publishers 1996Exchange rates, speculative attacks, economic fundamentals, Mexico, B22, S31, F33,