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 ...

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...

Financial markets are overwhelmed by daily announcements. We use experimental asset markets to assess the impact of releasing public messages with different levels of reliability on asset prices. Subjects receive qualitative announcements in predetermined trading periods that are either preset by the experimenter, randomly selected, or determined by past asset market prices. We find that messag...

This paper examines the effects of the most recent U.S. housing bubble on the fiscal policy of California cities. We use an instrumental variables approach that helps isolate fiscal consequences of house price appreciation by taking advantage of the influence of local topological constraints on the elasticity of house prices with respect to interest rates. Our analysis generates three main find...

We consider a dynamic asset pricing model with one asset, in which one informed trader trades against liquidity traders and competitive market makers. Informed trader has private information about the fundamental value of the asset as well as the exogenous demand shock on the market. We characterize the unique linear Markov equilibrium of the model. With just the private information about funda...

We analyze 27 house price indexes of Las Vegas from Jun. 1983 to Mar. 2005, corresponding to 27 different zip codes. These analyses confirm the existence of a real-estate bubble, defined as a price acceleration faster than exponential, which is found however to be confined to a rather limited time interval in the recent past from approximately 2003 to mid-2004 and has progressively transformed ...

The paper models the links between financial fragility, asset markets and monetary policy. It is shown that central bank’s concern about the cost of financial disruption may generate an asymmetric response, thus contributing to the creation of an asset price bubble. In an economy with a highly leveraged financial structure, the central bank has an incentive to prevent a “run” on financial inter...