We analyze the stock market by modeling it as a timing game among arbitrageurs for beating the gun. We assume that (1) arbitrageurs are behavioral with a small probability, (2) the bubble soft-lands, and (3) the postcrash price increases as the X-day is postponed. Due to these assumptions, the effect of reputation assumes importance because any rational arbitrageur is willing to build a reputat...

When investors have differences of opinion about the payoffs of a stock, Harrison and Kreps (1978) demonstrate the existence of a speculative bubble in the stock price, that is, the stock price can exceed the valuation of the most optimistic investor. A crucial condition that supports this result in their model is that investors are not allowed to short sell the stock. This paper demonstrates t...

One of the most important issues facing central banks is whether they should respond to potential asset-price bubbles. Because asset prices are a central element in the transmission mechanisms of monetary policy, the issue of how monetary policy might respond to asset-price movements is not whether it should respond at all but whether it should respond over and above the response called for in ...

We study the formation of derivative prices in equilibrium between risk-neutral agents with heterogeneous beliefs about the dynamics of the underlying. Under the condition that short-selling is limited, we prove the existence of a unique equilibrium price and show that it incorporates the speculative value of possibly reselling the derivative. This value typically leads to a bubble; that is, th...

Standard optimzing models of consumption postulate that consumption is a function of wealth and implicitly assume that wealth is comprised of assets whose market price coincides with the fundamental price, defined as the expected present value of future dividends. We use a simple theoretical framework to show that when the market price deviates from the fundamental price, consumption behavior w...

We consider a general equilibrium model with heterogeneous agents, borrowing constraints, and exogenous labor supply. First, the existence of intertemporal equilibrium is proved even if the aggregate capitals are not uniformly bounded above and the production functions are not time invariant. Second, we call by physical capital bubble a situation in which the fundamental value of physical capit...

I conduct an experiment to observe individual traders’ beliefs and desired behavior in a partial-equilibrium asset market. Isolated traders trade a risky asset in a market with exogenous prices. The price series exhibits a "bubble," diverging strongly from the expected dividend yield. Before trading, traders predict the asset’s price in the upcoming period, the price in the …nal period, and the...