| This dissertation was written under the guidance of Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas. It consists of three chapters.; The first two chapters' principal goal is to deepen the understanding of the role of informational heterogeneity in a setup governed by self-fulfilling beliefs. To that end, the first chapter incorporates economic agents' incentive to trade against their private information in the global games framework of Morris and Shin (1998). As a result, the market price provides an endogenous public signal about the state of the economy. In such a context, the necessary condition for equilibrium uniqueness, in terms of the relative precision of public and private information, is derived to be weaker than its analog in the Morris-Shin setup. As a by-product, the chapter's model provides a new perspective on currency-crisis management.; The second chapter modifies the textbook second-generation approach to currency crises by building an environment, which incorporates (i) Morris and Shin's global games structure and (ii) a foreign-exchange market governed by an intertemporal strategic complementarity of agents' actions. The existence of outcome indeterminacy within the chapter's model depends on macroeconomic characteristics that have played different, if any, roles in the related literature. These characteristics are (i) the state variable's intertemporal stochastic process, (ii) the intertemporal discount factor of the central authority administering the exchange rate regime, (iii) the latter authority's resolve to control inflation under a managed float. Comparative statics exercises underscore the rich equilibrium implications of intertemporal strategic complementarity within a foreign-exchange market.; The third chapter relies explicitly on the models of Bertola-Svensson (1993) and the present dissertation's first chapter in order to conduct an empirical analysis of the speculative attacks on the French Franc and the Italian Lira in the fall of 1992. The underlying framework shapes the estimation and inference procedures in a way unexplored by the related empirical literature. When seen through the prism of their theoretical foundations, the empirical results of the paper suggest that the French-Franc attack is conducted within equilibrium multiplicity; in contrast, it is impossible to determine which equilibrium type leads to the Italian-Lira attack. |
