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This paper proposes a theory of twin banking-currency crises in which both fundamentals and self-fulfilling beliefs play crucial roles. Fundamentals determine whether crises will occur. Self-fulfilling beliefs determine when they occur. The fundamental that causes twin crises' is government guarantees to domestic banks' foreign creditors. When these guarantees are in place twin crises inevitably occur, but their timing is a multiple equilibrium phenomenon that depends on agents' beliefs. So while self-fulfilling beliefs have an important role to play, twin crises do not happen just anywhere. They happen in countries where there are fundamental problems - problems such as guarantees to the financial sector.

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This paper investigates the response of real wages and hours worked to an exogenous shock in fiscal policy. We identify this shock with the dynamic response of government purchases and tax rates to an exogenous increase in military purchases. The fiscal shocks that we isolate are characterized by highly correlated increases in government purchases, tax rates and hours worked as well as persistent declines in real wages. We assess the ability of standard Real Business Cycle models to account for these facts. They can-but only under the assumption that marginal income tax rates are constant, a standard assumption in the literature. Once we abandon this counterfactual assumption, RBC models cannot account for the facts. We argue that our empirical findings pose a challenge to a wide class of business cycle models.