Crises and Prices: Information Aggregation, Multiplicity and Volatility

George-Marios Angeletos () and Iván Werning

No 11015, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Many argue that crises -- such as currency attacks, bank runs and riots -- can be described as times of non-fundamental volatility. We argue that crises are also times when endogenous sources of information are closely monitored and thus an important part of the phenomena. We study the role of endogenous information in generating volatility by introducing a financial market in a coordination game where agents have heterogeneous information about the fundamentals. The equilibrium price aggregates information without restoring common knowledge. In contrast to the case with exogenous information, we find that uniqueness may not be obtained as a perturbation from common knowledge: multiplicity is ensured when individuals observe fundamentals with small idiosyncratic noise. Multiplicity may emerge also in the financial price. When the equilibrium is unique, it becomes more sensitive to non-fundamental shocks as private noise is reduced.

JEL-codes: D8 E5 F3 G1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-fin and nep-mac
Date: 2004-12
Note: EFG
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Related works:
Working Paper: Crises and Prices: Information Aggregation, Multiplicity and Volatility (2005)
Journal Article: Crises and Prices: Information Aggregation, Multiplicity, and Volatility (2006)
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