IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/chf/rpseri/rp1727.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Can We Use Volatility to Diagnose Financial Bubbles? Lessons from 40 Historical Bubbles

Author

Listed:
  • Didier Sornette

    (ETH Zurich and Swiss Finance Institute)

  • Peter Cauwels

    (ETH Zurich)

  • Georgi Smilyanov

    (ETH Zurich)

Abstract

We inspect the price volatility before, during, and after financial asset bubbles in order to uncover possible commonalities and check empirically whether volatility might be used as an indicator or an early warning signal of an unsustainable price increase and the associated crash. Some researchers and finance practitioners believe that historical and/or implied volatility increase before a crash, but we do not see this as a consistent behavior. We examine forty well-known bubbles and, using creative graphical representations to capture robustly the transient dynamics of the volatility, find that the dynamics of the volatility would not have been a useful predictor of the subsequent crashes. In approximately two-third of the studied bubbles, the crash follows a period of lower volatility, reminiscent of the idiom of a “lull before the storm”. This paradoxical behavior, from the lenses of traditional asset pricing models, further questions the general relationship between risk and return.

Suggested Citation

  • Didier Sornette & Peter Cauwels & Georgi Smilyanov, 2017. "Can We Use Volatility to Diagnose Financial Bubbles? Lessons from 40 Historical Bubbles," Swiss Finance Institute Research Paper Series 17-27, Swiss Finance Institute.
    • Handle: RePEc:chf:rpseri:rp1727
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3006642
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Dirk G Baur & Kristoffer Glover, 2012. "A Gold Bubble?," Working Paper Series 175, Finance Discipline Group, UTS Business School, University of Technology, Sydney.
    2. De Long, J Bradford & Andrei Shleifer & Lawrence H. Summers & Robert J. Waldmann, 1990. "Noise Trader Risk in Financial Markets," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 98(4), pages 703-738, August.
    3. Dilip Abreu & Markus K. Brunnermeier, 2003. "Bubbles and Crashes," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 71(1), pages 173-204, January.
    4. Allen F. & Morris S. & Postlewaite A., 1993. "Finite Bubbles with Short Sale Constraints and Asymmetric Information," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 61(2), pages 206-229, December.
    5. Evans, George W, 1991. "Pitfalls in Testing for Explosive Bubbles in Asset Prices," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 81(4), pages 922-930, September.
    6. Bohl, Martin T. & Siklos, Pierre L. & Werner, Thomas, 2007. "Do central banks react to the stock market? The case of the Bundesbank," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 31(3), pages 719-733, March.
    7. K. Bastiaensen & P. Cauwels & D. Sornette & R. Woodard & W. -X. Zhou, 2009. "The Chinese Equity Bubble: Ready to Burst," Papers 0907.1827, arXiv.org.
    8. Evanoff, Douglas D. & Kaufman, George G. & Malliaris, A. G. (ed.), 2012. "New Perspectives on Asset Price Bubbles," OUP Catalogue, Oxford University Press, number 9780199844401.
    9. Laurent E. Calvet, 2004. "How to Forecast Long-Run Volatility: Regime Switching and the Estimation of Multifractal Processes," Journal of Financial Econometrics, Oxford University Press, vol. 2(1), pages 49-83.
    10. Mark A. Carlson, 2006. "A brief history of the 1987 stock market crash with a discussion of the Federal Reserve response," Finance and Economics Discussion Series 2007-13, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.).
    11. Robert B. Barsky, 2009. "The Japanese Bubble: A 'Heterogeneous' Approach," NBER Working Papers 15052, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    12. Beltratti, Andrea & Bortolotti, Bernardo & Caccavaio, Marianna, 2011. "The stock market reaction to the 2005 non-tradable share reform in China," Working Paper Series 1339, European Central Bank.
    13. Bates, David S, 1991. "The Crash of '87: Was It Expected? The Evidence from Options Markets," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 46(3), pages 1009-1044, July.
    14. Olivier J. Blanchard & Mark W. Watson, 1982. "Bubbles, Rational Expectations and Financial Markets," NBER Working Papers 0945, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    15. Evanoff, Douglas D. & Kaufman, George G. & Malliaris, A. G. (ed.), 2012. "New Perspectives on Asset Price Bubbles," OUP Catalogue, Oxford University Press, number 9780199844333.
    16. Utpal Bhattacharya, 2008. "The Causes and Consequences of Recent Financial Market Bubbles: An Introduction," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 21(1), pages 3-10, January.
    17. Andersen, J.V. & Sornette, D., 2004. "Fearless versus fearful speculative financial bubbles," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 337(3), pages 565-585.
    18. Diba, Behzad T & Grossman, Herschel I, 1988. "Explosive Rational Bubbles in Stock Prices?," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 78(3), pages 520-530, June.
    19. Brunnermeier, Markus K. & Oehmke, Martin, 2013. "Bubbles, Financial Crises, and Systemic Risk," Handbook of the Economics of Finance, in: G.M. Constantinides & M. Harris & R. M. Stulz (ed.), Handbook of the Economics of Finance, volume 2, chapter 0, pages 1221-1288, Elsevier.
    20. Keller, Joachim & Glatzer, Ernst & Craig, Ben R. & Scheicher, Martin, 2003. "The Forecasting Performance of German Stock Option Densities," Discussion Paper Series 1: Economic Studies 2003,17, Deutsche Bundesbank.
    21. Camerer, Colin, 1989. "Bubbles and Fads in Asset Prices," Journal of Economic Surveys, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 3(1), pages 3-41.
    22. Jean-Philippe Bouchaud & Andrew Matacz & Marc Potters, 2001. "The leverage effect in financial markets: retarded volatility and market panic," Science & Finance (CFM) working paper archive 0101120, Science & Finance, Capital Fund Management.
    23. Allen, Franklin & Gale, Douglas, 2000. "Bubbles and Crises," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 110(460), pages 236-255, January.
    24. Ehsan Ahmed & J. Barkley Rosser Jr. & Jamshed Y. Uppal, 2010. "Emerging Markets and Stock Market Bubbles: Nonlinear Speculation?," Emerging Markets Finance and Trade, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 46(4), pages 23-40, January.
    25. Bates, David S., 2000. "Post-'87 crash fears in the S&P 500 futures option market," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 94(1-2), pages 181-238.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Matteo Michielon & Asma Khedher & Peter Spreij, 2021. "Liquidity-free implied volatilities: an approach using conic finance," Papers 2110.11718, arXiv.org.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Knight, John & Satchell, Stephen & Srivastava, Nandini, 2014. "Steady state distributions for models of locally explosive regimes: Existence and econometric implications," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 41(C), pages 281-288.
    2. Brunnermeier, Markus K. & Oehmke, Martin, 2013. "Bubbles, Financial Crises, and Systemic Risk," Handbook of the Economics of Finance, in: G.M. Constantinides & M. Harris & R. M. Stulz (ed.), Handbook of the Economics of Finance, volume 2, chapter 0, pages 1221-1288, Elsevier.
    3. Tsvetanov, Daniel & Coakley, Jerry & Kellard, Neil, 2016. "Bubbling over! The behaviour of oil futures along the yield curve," Journal of Empirical Finance, Elsevier, vol. 38(PB), pages 516-533.
    4. John Knight & Stephen Satchell & Nandini Srivastava, 2012. "Steady-State Distributions for Models of Bubbles: their Existence and Econometric Implications," Birkbeck Working Papers in Economics and Finance 1208, Birkbeck, Department of Economics, Mathematics & Statistics.
    5. Drobyshevsky Sergey & Narkevich Sergey & E. Pikulina & D. Polevoy, 2009. "Analysis Of a Possible Bubble On the Russian Real Estate Market," Research Paper Series, Gaidar Institute for Economic Policy, issue 128.
    6. Jerome L Kreuser & Didier Sornette, 2017. "Super-Exponential RE Bubble Model with Efficient Crashes," Swiss Finance Institute Research Paper Series 17-33, Swiss Finance Institute.
    7. Tolhurst, Tor N., 2018. "A Model-Free Bubble Detection Method: Application to the World Market for Superstar Wines," 2018 Annual Meeting, August 5-7, Washington, D.C. 274387, Agricultural and Applied Economics Association.
    8. Paulo M.M. Rodrigues & Rita Fradique Lourenço, 2015. "House prices: bubbles, exuberance or something else? Evidence from euro area countries," Working Papers w201517, Banco de Portugal, Economics and Research Department.
    9. Li Lin & Didier Sornette, 2009. "Diagnostics of Rational Expectation Financial Bubbles with Stochastic Mean-Reverting Termination Times," Papers 0911.1921, arXiv.org.
    10. Hüsler, A. & Sornette, D. & Hommes, C.H., 2013. "Super-exponential bubbles in lab experiments: Evidence for anchoring over-optimistic expectations on price," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 92(C), pages 304-316.
    11. John R. Conlon, 2015. "Should Central Banks Burst Bubbles? Some Microeconomic Issues," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 125(582), pages 141-161, February.
    12. Dow, James & Han, Jungsuk, 2015. "Contractual incompleteness, limited liability and asset price bubbles," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 116(2), pages 383-409.
    13. Barlevy, Gadi, 2014. "A leverage-based model of speculative bubbles," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 153(C), pages 459-505.
    14. Robert A. Jarrow, 2015. "Asset Price Bubbles," Annual Review of Financial Economics, Annual Reviews, vol. 7(1), pages 201-218, December.
    15. Al-Anaswah, Nael & Wilfling, Bernd, 2011. "Identification of speculative bubbles using state-space models with Markov-switching," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 35(5), pages 1073-1086, May.
    16. Taipalus, Katja, 2006. "Bubbles in the Finnish and US equities markets," Scientific Monographs, Bank of Finland, number 35/2006.
    17. Jie Zheng, 2008. "Strong Bubbles and Common Expected Bubbles in a Finite Horizon Model," Levine's Working Paper Archive 814577000000000038, David K. Levine.
    18. repec:zbw:bofism:2012_047 is not listed on IDEAS
    19. repec:zbw:bofism:2006_035 is not listed on IDEAS
    20. Taipalus, Katja, 2012. "Detecting asset price bubbles with time-series methods," Scientific Monographs, Bank of Finland, number 2012_047.
    21. Taipalus, Katja, 2012. "Detecting asset price bubbles with time-series methods," Bank of Finland Scientific Monographs, Bank of Finland, volume 0, number sm2012_047.
    22. Taipalus, Katja, 2006. "Bubbles in the Finnish and US equities markets," Bank of Finland Scientific Monographs, Bank of Finland, volume 0, number sm2006_035.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    gradual portfolio adjustment; international portfolio allocation; predictable excess returns.;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • F30 - International Economics - - International Finance - - - General
    • F41 - International Economics - - Macroeconomic Aspects of International Trade and Finance - - - Open Economy Macroeconomics
    • G11 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - Portfolio Choice; Investment Decisions
    • G12 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - Asset Pricing; Trading Volume; Bond Interest Rates

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:chf:rpseri:rp1727. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Ridima Mittal (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/fameech.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.