The objective of this paper is twofold. First, it identifies and categorizes the currency crises suffered by Argentina from 1825 to 2002. Second, it looks for regularities in the behaviour of key macroeconomic variables in the neighbourhood of crises by means of graphic analysis, non-parametric and econometric techniques. We found that expansions in public expenditures as well as increases in the debt to GDP ratio and falls in the rate of growth of bank deposits contribute to spur the probability of crisis. Unfavourable external conditions, jointly with domestic imbalances, help to explain very deep crises or crashes.

Financial crises are not unique to current financial systems. Are crises alike? Have they become more frequent, longer lasting and more severe since the 20th century? What does history tell us? The objective of this paper is to study the financial crises that have occurred in Spain over the last 150 years. We consider different types of crises (banking, currency and stock market crises), together with all their possible combinations, estimate their frequency by period and measure their length and depth. The main conclusion we obtain is that Spanish crises have been more frequent than in the rest of the world and have been more severe and more complex since 1973, as the 2007 crisis is confirming.

This paper introduces adaptive learning into the third-generation currency crisis model of Aghion, Bacchetta, and Banerjee (2001, Currency crises and monetary policy in an economy with credit constraints, European Economic Review 45, 1121–1150). Adaptive learning might reflect, for example, uncertainty about the economy's exposure to adverse balance sheet effects. Even when equilibrium is unique, we show that the learning algorithm's escape dynamics can produce the same kind of Markov-switching exchange rate behavior that is typically attributed to sunspots or herds. An advantage of our learning model is that currency crises become endogenous, in the sense that their stochastic properties can be related to assumptions about learning and other structural features of the economy.