Public debt and currency crisis: how central bank opacity can make things bad?

Abstract

This paper examines how the transparency in monetary policy decision can impact the likelihood of currency crisis in a simple open economy model with public debt. In the presence of opacity, it is found that if the debt is high, the government will devaluate and vice versa, and the self-fulfilling multiple equilibria solution disappears. Furthermore, the opacity reduces the threshold of public debt above which the government is considered as totally lacking the credibility in its pre-commitment to maintain fixed the exchange rate.