The authors of this book confess to a fixation on understanding extreme events such as speculative bubbles, currency reforms, and speculative attacks on fixed exchange rate regimes and metallic monetary standards - all markers of economic change. This text brings together their research in these areas during the 1980s and early 1990s, highlighting in particular the close relation of their work on bubbles to that of policy switching, or understanding the impact of prospective and past policy changes on individual economic behaviour.