Large house price bubbles can be devastating for the real economy. Therefore, understanding the conditions under which large house price bubbles occur is fundamental. We shed new light on this issue in a laboratory setting. We find that endowing subjects with a lower preference for housing services creates larger experimental house price bubbles. This is in line with the theoretical model mecha...

Asset-price bubbles challenge the explanatory and predictive power of standard economic theory, suggesting that neuroeconomic measures should be explored as potential tools for improving the predictive power of standard theory. We begin this exploration by reviewing results from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies of lab asset-price bubbles and herding behavior (i.e., following...

The sharp increase in agricultural commodity prices in 2008 and in 2011 has triggered an intensive debate on the causes for these price booms. Speculative bubbles have been quoted as one factor among others for the price peaks. Against this background, our paper contributes to this discussion by implementing a novel test procedure for speculative bubbles which has been suggested in the stock ma...

After the 2007 credit crisis, financial bubbles have once again emerged as a topic of current concern. An open problem is to determine in real time whether or not a given asset’s price process exhibits a bubble. Due to recent progress in the characterization of asset price bubbles using the arbitrage-free martingale pricing technology, we are able to propose a new methodology for answering this...

Do women and men behave differently in financial asset markets? Our results from an asset market experiment show a marked gender difference in producing speculative price bubbles. Mixed markets show intermediate values, and a meta-analysis of 35 markets from different studies confirms the inverse relationship between the magnitude of price bubbles and the frequency of female traders in the mark...

Evidence shows that asset price bubbles typically precede financial crises and financial crises are accompanied by the collapse of bubbles. In addition, stock market booms and busts are typically associated with credit market booms and busts. The recent US housing and stock market bubbles and the subsequent Great Recession that began in late 2007 provide an example. The stock market booms in th...

Rational price bubble arises when the price of an asset exceeds the asset’s fundamental value, that is, the present value of future dividend payments. The important result of Santos and Woodford (1997) says that price bubbles cannot exist in equilibrium in the standard dynamic asset pricing model with rational agents facing borrowing constraints as long as assets are in strictly positive supply...

Episodes of market crashes have fascinated economists for centuries. Although many academics, practitioners and policy makers have studied questions related to collapsing asset price bubbles, there is little consensus yet about their causes and effects. This review and essay evaluates some of the hypotheses offered to explain the market crashes that often follow asset price bubbles. Starting fr...