Information, Amplification and Financial Crisis

We propose a parsimonious model of information choice in a global coordination game of regime change that is used to analyze debt crises, bank runs or currency attacks. A change in the publicly available information alters the uncertainty about the behavior of other investors. Greater strategic uncertainty makes private information more valuable, so more investors acquire information. This change in the proportion of informed investors amplifies the impact of the initial change in public information on the probability of a crisis. Our amplification result explains how a small deterioration in public information can cause a financial crisis.