IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nwu/cmsems/1252.html

On the Possibility of Stock Market Crashes in the Absence of Portfolio Insurance

Author

Listed:
  • Gadi Barlevy
  • Pietro Veronesi

Abstract

stock market crash on hedging strategies by portfolio insurers, which dictated selling stocks as soon as prices fell. The fact that the practice of buying and selling stocks as portfolio insurance has virtually disappeared since then has given many comfort that a replay of the 1987 crash, when prices fell so much so quickly, is unlikely. This note argues with this view by developing a model in which crashes are possible in the absence of portfolio insurance. In our model, a crash is driven by panic selling among rational but uninformed traders.

Suggested Citation

  • Gadi Barlevy & Pietro Veronesi, 1999. "On the Possibility of Stock Market Crashes in the Absence of Portfolio Insurance," Discussion Papers 1252, Northwestern University, Center for Mathematical Studies in Economics and Management Science.
  • Handle: RePEc:nwu:cmsems:1252
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/research/math/papers/1252.pdf
    File Function: main text
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Gennotte, Gerard & Leland, Hayne, 1990. "Market Liquidity, Hedging, and Crashes," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 80(5), pages 999-1021, December.
    2. Grossman, Sanford, 1978. "Further results on the informational efficiency of competitive stock markets," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 18(1), pages 81-101, June.
    3. Madrigal, Vicente & Scheinkman, Jose A., 1997. "Price Crashes, Information Aggregation, and Market-Making," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 75(1), pages 16-63, July.
    4. Wilson, Charles A, 1979. "Equilibrium and Adverse Selection," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 69(2), pages 313-317, May.
    5. Bulow, Jeremy & Klemperer, Paul, 1994. "Rational Frenzies and Crashes," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 102(1), pages 1-23, February.
    6. Admati, Anat R, 1985. "A Noisy Rational Expectations Equilibrium for Multi-asset Securities Markets," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 53(3), pages 629-657, May.
    7. Gadi Barlevy & Pietro Veronesi, 2000. "Information Acquisition in Financial Markets," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 67(1), pages 79-90.
    8. Charles Wilson, 1980. "The Nature of Equilibrium in Markets with Adverse Selection," Bell Journal of Economics, The RAND Corporation, vol. 11(1), pages 108-130, Spring.
    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. Hsiao, Yu-Jen & Tsai, Wei-Che, 2018. "Financial literacy and participation in the derivatives markets," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 88(C), pages 15-29.

    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. Barlevy, Gadi & Veronesi, Pietro, 2003. "Rational panics and stock market crashes," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 110(2), pages 234-263, June.
    2. Lou, Youcheng & Parsa, Sahar & Ray, Debraj & Li, Duan & Wang, Shouyang, 2019. "Information aggregation in a financial market with general signal structure," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 183(C), pages 594-624.
    3. Manzano, Carolina & Vives, Xavier, 2011. "Public and private learning from prices, strategic substitutability and complementarity, and equilibrium multiplicity," Journal of Mathematical Economics, Elsevier, vol. 47(3), pages 346-369.
    4. Masahiro Watanabe, 2002. "Price Volatility and Investor Behavior in an Overlapping Generations Model with Information Asymmetry," Yale School of Management Working Papers amz2636, Yale School of Management, revised 01 Jul 2002.
    5. Verrecchia, Robert E., 2001. "Essays on disclosure," Journal of Accounting and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 32(1-3), pages 97-180, December.
    6. Gao, Feng & Song, Fengming & Wang, Jun, 2013. "Rational expectations equilibrium with uncertain proportion of informed traders," Journal of Financial Markets, Elsevier, vol. 16(3), pages 387-413.
    7. Masahiro Watanabe, 2002. "Price Volatility and Investor Behavior in an Overlapping Generations Model with Information Asymmetry," Yale School of Management Working Papers amz2636, Yale School of Management, revised 01 Jul 2002.
    8. Adriani, Fabrizio & Deidda, Luca G., 2009. "Price signaling and the strategic benefits of price rigidities," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 67(2), pages 335-350, November.
    9. Bing Han & Liyan Yang, 2013. "Social Networks, Information Acquisition, and Asset Prices," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 59(6), pages 1444-1457, June.
    10. repec:bge:wpaper:620 is not listed on IDEAS
    11. Adriani, Fabrizio & Deidda, Luca G., 2011. "Competition and the signaling role of prices," International Journal of Industrial Organization, Elsevier, vol. 29(4), pages 412-425, July.
    12. Laura E. Kodres & Matthew Pritsker, 1998. "A rational expectations model of financial contagion," Finance and Economics Discussion Series 1998-48, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.).
    13. Pigeard de Almeida Prado, Fernando & Belitsky, Vladimir & Ferreira, Alex Luiz, 2011. "Social interactions, product differentiation and discontinuity of demand," Journal of Mathematical Economics, Elsevier, vol. 47(4-5), pages 642-653.
    14. Maarten C.W. Janssen & Vladimir Karamychev, 2000. "Continuous Time Trading in Markets with Adverse Selection," Tinbergen Institute Discussion Papers 00-109/1, Tinbergen Institute.
    15. Helton Saulo & Jeremias Leao, 2011. "Equilibrium, Adverse Selection, and Statistical Distributions," Economics Bulletin, AccessEcon, vol. 31(3), pages 2066-2074.
    16. Giovanni Cespa & Xavier Vives, 2012. "Dynamic Trading and Asset Prices: Keynes vs. Hayek," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 79(2), pages 539-580.
    17. repec:dau:papers:123456789/29 is not listed on IDEAS
    18. Ouzan, Samuel, 2020. "Loss aversion and market crashes," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 92(C), pages 70-86.
    19. Simon van Norden & Huntley Schaller & ), 1995. "Speculative Behaviour, Regime-Switching, and Stock Market Crashes," Econometrics 9502003, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    20. Maarten Janssen & Santanu Roy, 2004. "On durable goods markets with entry and adverse selection," Canadian Journal of Economics, Canadian Economics Association, vol. 37(3), pages 552-589, August.
    21. Blouin, Max R., 2003. "Quality undersupply and oversupply," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 109(1), pages 130-139, March.
    22. Alvaro Sandroni, 1997. "Learning Rare Events," Discussion Papers 1199, Northwestern University, Center for Mathematical Studies in Economics and Management Science.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    • G14 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - Information and Market Efficiency; Event Studies; Insider Trading
    • D82 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Asymmetric and Private Information; Mechanism Design
    • D84 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Expectations; Speculations

    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:nwu:cmsems:1252. 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: Fran Walker The email address of this maintainer does not seem to be valid anymore. Please ask Fran Walker to update the entry or send us the correct address (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/cmnwuus.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.