The over-hyped Dot.com revolution bubbled and crashed at the end of the 1990s, leaving a largely unused physical and virtual infrastructure that eventually supported the rise of social media that did-indeed-transform life. Not necessarily in a good way. As Robert Gordon famously claimed, you can...

Queen Anne's Bounty was a corporation created in 1704 to redistribute income within the Anglican clergy. Structurally a saver needing a liquid asset, the corporation pursued a conservative strategy of investing in the dominant form of government debt, adapting as the market changed. It was...

Britain's debt was nil in 1688 and 60% of GDP in 1717. From 1717 to 1722 the debt was restructured, including through the South Sea operation of 1720. I discuss the reasons for the restructuring and the tensions it revealed between taxpayers and creditors. The South Sea bubble turned the...

Speculation has long been thought to have significant economic effects, but it is difficult to measure, making it challenging to examine these effects empirically. In this paper we measure speculation in the UK since 1785 by using business and financial reporting in The Times newspaper. Our...

This study examines whether Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) exercise a greater proportion of their exercisable options in response to firm-specific stock price bubbles. For a sample of U.S. firms from 1992 to 2021, the study identifies stock price bubble periods using the Generalized Sup...

Financial assets often exhibit explosive price surges followed by abrupt collapses, alongside persistent volatility clustering. Motivated by these features, we introduce a mixed causal-noncausal invertible-noninvertible autoregressive moving average generalized autoregressive conditional...

This study leverages the Log-Periodic Power Law Singularity (LPPLS) confidence indicator to effectively identify bubbles in agricultural commodity markets. We analyze five major grain price indices reported by the International Grains Council (IGC) from January 2000 to April 2023, successfully...

We construct a model of bubbles where an asset can be used as collateral primarily due to higher-order uncertainty: while both a lender and a borrower know that the intrinsic value of the asset is low, they may still believe that a “greater fool” exists who will purchase it at a much higher...

The study examines housing affordability in Germany from 2017 to 2023 in light of rising real estate prices and challenges in the housing market. It uses the Housing Affordability Index to identify trends and patterns and propose policy measures to tackle the problems. The results show regional...

We empirically document deviations of residential real estate prices from fundamental values at the micro level and investigate their relationship with local bank lending growth during a period of unconventional monetary policy. Our findings indicate a positive relationship between credit growth...

Deviation of an asset price from its fundamental value, commonly referred to as a price bubble, is a well-known phenomenon in financial markets. Mathematically, a bubble arises when the deflated price process transitions from a martingale to a strict local martingale. This paper explores price...