We construct a model of asset market exuberance, collapse and recovery using subjective investor-based rational expectations about the impact of fundamentals on the market price. Investors are assumed to have heterogeneous market sentiments, allowing them to be exuberant, cautious, or fundamentalist via boundary conditions that describe their respective views of the market impact of the same ec...

I review the literature on financial speculation driven by belief disagreements from a macroeconomics perspective. To highlight unifying themes, develop stylized macroeconomic model that embeds several mechanisms. With short-selling constraints, can generate overvaluation and speculative bubbles. Leverage substantially inflate bubbles, leverage limits depend perceived downside risks. Shifts in ...

In this paper we present an interacting-agent model of speculative activity explaining bubbles and crashes in stock markets. We describe stock markets through an infinite-range Ising model to formulate the tendency of traders getting influenced by the investment attitude of other traders. Bubbles and crashes are understood and described qualitatively and quantitatively in terms of the classical...

Numerous factors have been proposed in the literature as explaining the recent commodity price movements. In this paper we focus on one of the most widely discussed factors, the impact of speculative bubbles. We investigate whether commodity prices during the spike of 2007–2008 might have deviated from their intrinsic values based on market fundamentals. To do this, we use a bootstrap methodolo...

This paper develops an equilibrium model of speculative bubbles that can be used to explore the role of various policies in either giving rise to or eliminating the possibility of asset bubbles, e.g. restricting the use of certain types of loan contracts, imposing down-payment restrictions, and changing inter-bank rates. As in previous work by Allen and Gorton (1993) and Allen and Gale (2000), ...

Using a recently introduced rational expectation model of bubbles, based on the interplay between stochasticity and positive feedbacks of prices on returns and volatility, we develop a new methodology to test how this model classifies 9 time series that have been previously considered as bubbles ending in crashes. The model predicts the existence of two anomalous behaviors occurring simultaneou...

We describe a rational expectations model in which speculative bubbles in house prices can emerge. Within this model both speculators and their lenders use interestonly mortgages (IOs) rather than traditional mortgages when there is a bubble. Absent a bubble, there is no tendency for IOs to be used. These insights are used to assess the extent to which house prices in US cities were driven by s...

In this paper we study an economy with a high degree of financialization in which (nonfinancial) firms need loans from commercial banks to finance production, service debt, and make long-term investments. Along the business cycle, the economy follows a Minsky base cycle with firms traversing through the various stages of financial fragility, i.e. hedge, speculative and Ponzi finance (cf., Minsk...

Monte Carlo evidence [Evans (1991)] indicates that when speculative bubbles are collapsible, the traditional cointegration approach based on unit root tests has some serious drawbacks. We propose in this paper an alternative approach to test such bubbles. We demonstrate that the suggested test has some advantages over the traditional unit root based tests, especially for bubbles that are collap...