We study the effect of allowing short selling on the efficiency of the pricing mechanism and the incidence of price bubbles in laboratory asset markets. We report an experiment that illustrates that allowing a sufficiently large short selling capacity results in a substantial reduction in the magnitude and duration of bubbles, but also leads to sustained episodes of busts, during which prices a...

We examine how the banking sector may ignite the formation of asset price bubbles when there is access to abundant liquidity. Inside banks, given limited liability and lack of observability of effort, loan officers (or risk takers) are compensated based on the volume of loans. Outside banks, when there is heightened macroeconomic risk, investors reduce direct investment and hold more bank depos...