IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/aea/aejmac/v3y2011i3p159-91.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Learning about Risk and Return: A Simple Model of Bubbles and Crashes

Author

Listed:
  • William A. Branch
  • George W. Evans

Abstract

This paper demonstrates that an asset pricing model with least-squares learning can lead to bubbles and crashes as endogenous responses to the fundamentals driving asset prices. When agents are risk-averse they need to make forecasts of the conditional variance of a stock's return. Recursive updating of both the conditional variance and the expected return implies several mechanisms through which learning impacts stock prices. Extended periods of excess volatility, bubbles, and crashes arise with a frequency that depends on the extent to which past data is discounted. A central role is played by changes over time in agents' estimates of risk. (JEL D81, D83, E32, G01, G12)

Suggested Citation

  • William A. Branch & George W. Evans, 2011. "Learning about Risk and Return: A Simple Model of Bubbles and Crashes," American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, American Economic Association, vol. 3(3), pages 159-191, July.
    • Handle: RePEc:aea:aejmac:v:3:y:2011:i:3:p:159-91
    Note: DOI: 10.1257/mac.3.3.159
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.aeaweb.org/articles.php?doi=10.1257/mac.3.3.159
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: http://www.aeaweb.org/aej/mac/data/2008-0128_data.zip
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: http://www.aeaweb.org/aej/mac/app/2008-0128_app.pdf
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to AEA members and institutional subscribers.
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Cho, In-Koo & Kasa, Kenneth, 2008. "Learning Dynamics And Endogenous Currency Crises," Macroeconomic Dynamics, Cambridge University Press, vol. 12(2), pages 257-285, April.
    2. Jean-Michel Grandmont, 1998. "Expectations Formation and Stability of Large Socioeconomic Systems," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 66(4), pages 741-782, July.
    3. Kenneth D. West, 1987. "A Specification Test for Speculative Bubbles," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 102(3), pages 553-580.
    4. George W. Evans & Seppo Honkapohja, 1998. "Economic Dynamics with Learning: New Stability Results," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 65(1), pages 23-44.
    5. Volker Böhm & Carl Chiarella, 2005. "Mean Variance Preferences, Expectations Formation, And The Dynamics Of Random Asset Prices," Mathematical Finance, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 15(1), pages 61-97, January.
    6. 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.
    7. Blanchard, Olivier Jean, 1979. "Speculative bubbles, crashes and rational expectations," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 3(4), pages 387-389.
    8. Olivier J. Blanchard & Mark W. Watson, 1982. "Bubbles, Rational Expectations and Financial Markets," NBER Working Papers 0945, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    9. Allan G. Timmermann, 1993. "How Learning in Financial Markets Generates Excess Volatility and Predictability in Stock Prices," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 108(4), pages 1135-1145.
    10. Alan Greenspan, 2005. "Reflections on central banking," Speech 126, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.).
    11. Froot, Kenneth A & Obstfeld, Maurice, 1991. "Intrinsic Bubbles: The Case of Stock Prices," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 81(5), pages 1189-1214, December.
    12. Merton, Robert C., 1980. "On estimating the expected return on the market : An exploratory investigation," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 8(4), pages 323-361, December.
    13. Eva Carceles-Poveda & Chryssi Giannitsarou, 2008. "Asset Pricing with Adaptive Learning," Review of Economic Dynamics, Elsevier for the Society for Economic Dynamics, vol. 11(3), pages 629-651, July.
    14. 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.
    15. LeRoy, Stephen F & Porter, Richard D, 1981. "The Present-Value Relation: Tests Based on Implied Variance Bounds," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 49(3), pages 555-574, May.
    16. Martin L. Weitzman, 2007. "Subjective Expectations and Asset-Return Puzzles," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 97(4), pages 1102-1130, September.
    17. repec:bla:jfinan:v:58:y:2003:i:3:p:1113-1138 is not listed on IDEAS
    18. Timmermann, Allan, 1994. "Can Agents Learn to Form Rational Expectations? Some Results on Convergence and Stability of Learning in the UK Stock Market," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 104(425), pages 777-797, July.
    19. Eli Ofek & Matthew Richardson, 2003. "DotCom Mania: The Rise and Fall of Internet Stock Prices," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 58(3), pages 1113-1137, June.
    20. Allan Timmermann, 1996. "Excess Volatility and Predictability of Stock Prices in Autoregressive Dividend Models with Learning," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 63(4), pages 523-557.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    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. William A. Branch & George W. Evans, 2011. "Learning about Risk and Return: A Simple Model of Bubbles and Crashes," American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, American Economic Association, vol. 3(3), pages 159-191, July.
    2. Vogel, Harold L. & Werner, Richard A., 2015. "An analytical review of volatility metrics for bubbles and crashes," International Review of Financial Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 38(C), pages 15-28.
    3. Yuchao Fan, 2022. "Dissecting the dot-com bubble in the 1990s NASDAQ," Papers 2206.14130, arXiv.org, revised Jul 2022.
    4. 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.
    5. Peter C. B. Phillips & Yangru Wu & Jun Yu, 2011. "EXPLOSIVE BEHAVIOR IN THE 1990s NASDAQ: WHEN DID EXUBERANCE ESCALATE ASSET VALUES?," International Economic Review, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania and Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association, vol. 52(1), pages 201-226, February.
    6. Gourieroux, C. & Jasiak, J. & Monfort, A., 2020. "Stationary bubble equilibria in rational expectation models," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 218(2), pages 714-735.
    7. 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.
    8. 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.
    9. Efsun Kürüm & Gerhard-Wilhelm Weber & Cem Iyigun, 2018. "Early warning on stock market bubbles via methods of optimization, clustering and inverse problems," Annals of Operations Research, Springer, vol. 260(1), pages 293-320, January.
    10. 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.
    11. Alina Sorescu & Sorin M. Sorescu & Will J. Armstrong & Bart Devoldere, 2018. "Two Centuries of Innovations and Stock Market Bubbles," Marketing Science, INFORMS, vol. 37(4), pages 507-529, August.
    12. Anderson, Keith & Brooks, Chris & Katsaris, Apostolos, 2010. "Speculative bubbles in the S&P 500: Was the tech bubble confined to the tech sector?," Journal of Empirical Finance, Elsevier, vol. 17(3), pages 345-361, June.
    13. Angelos Kanas & Yue Ma, 2004. "Intrinsic bubbles revisited: evidence from nonlinear cointegration and forecasting," Journal of Forecasting, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 23(4), pages 237-250.
    14. Refet S. Gürkaynak, 2008. "Econometric Tests Of Asset Price Bubbles: Taking Stock," Journal of Economic Surveys, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 22(1), pages 166-186, February.
    15. Hommes, Cars & Sonnemans, Joep & Tuinstra, Jan & van de Velden, Henk, 2008. "Expectations and bubbles in asset pricing experiments," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 67(1), pages 116-133, July.
    16. Efthymios Pavlidis & Alisa Yusupova & Ivan Paya & David Peel & Enrique Martínez-García & Adrienne Mack & Valerie Grossman, 2016. "Episodes of Exuberance in Housing Markets: In Search of the Smoking Gun," The Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics, Springer, vol. 53(4), pages 419-449, November.
    17. repec:zbw:bofism:2012_047 is not listed on IDEAS
    18. Su, Chi-Wei & Li, Zheng-Zheng & Chang, Hsu-Ling & Lobonţ, Oana-Ramona, 2017. "When Will Occur the Crude Oil Bubbles?," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 102(C), pages 1-6.
    19. Sharma, Shahil & Escobari, Diego, 2018. "Identifying price bubble periods in the energy sector," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 69(C), pages 418-429.
    20. Zhao, Yanping & Chang, Hsu-Ling & Su, Chi-Wei & Nian, Rui, 2015. "Gold bubbles: When are they most likely to occur?," Japan and the World Economy, Elsevier, vol. 34, pages 17-23.
    21. Simon van Norden & Huntley Schaller & ), 1995. "Speculative Behaviour, Regime-Switching, and Stock Market Crashes," Econometrics 9502003, University Library of Munich, Germany.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • D81 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Criteria for Decision-Making under Risk and Uncertainty
    • D83 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Search; Learning; Information and Knowledge; Communication; Belief; Unawareness
    • E32 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Prices, Business Fluctuations, and Cycles - - - Business Fluctuations; Cycles
    • G01 - Financial Economics - - General - - - Financial Crises
    • G12 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - Asset Pricing; Trading Volume; Bond Interest Rates

    Lists

    This item is featured on the following reading lists, Wikipedia, or ReplicationWiki pages:
    1. Learning about Risk and Return: A Simple Model of Bubbles and Crashes (AEJ:MA 2011) in ReplicationWiki

    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:aea:aejmac:v:3:y:2011:i:3:p:159-91. 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: Michael P. Albert (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/aeaaaea.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.