TY - JOUR AU - Goldberg,Linda S. TI - Collapsing Exchange Rate Regimes: Shocks and Biases JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 2702 PY - 1988 Y2 - September 1988 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w2702 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w2702.pdf N1 - Author contact info: Linda S. Goldberg Research Department, 3rd Floor Federal Reserve Bank-New York 33 Liberty Street New York, NY 10045 Tel: 212/720-2836 Fax: 212/720-6831 E-Mail: linda.goldberg@ny.frb.org AB - Patterns in domestic credit creation stemming from inconsistent fiscal policies have received widespread attention for aggravating speculative attacks on central bank foreign exchange reserves and contributing to the collapse of exchange rate regimes. This paper acknowledges the importance of monetary and fiscal discipline, but also emphasizes the importance of other random shocks to the domestic money market, most notably shocks from external credit supplies and relative prices. Policies of the domestic fiscal authorities are only partial catalysts for speculative attacks on a currency. Expansion of domestic credit stemming from the monetization of fiscal imbalances may be dominated by involuntary domestic credit expansions necessitated by surprise shortages in supplies of external capital. Further, the unexpected availability of external capital translates into a lower net critical reserve floor, making the depletion of central bank reserves by a speculative attack more difficult to accomplish. Also of considerable importance are relative price shocks which directly influence the probability of collapse by randomizing the demand for nominal money balances. Empirical studies of exchange rate crises that neglect these considerations will produce biased estimates of both expected collapse probabilities and anticipated post-collapse exchange rates. ER -