Analyses of the role of rational speculators in financial markets usually presume that such investors dampen price fluctuations by trading against liquidity or noise traders. This conclusion does not necessarily hold when noise traders follow positive-feedback investment strategies buy when...

A surprisingly large amount of commentary today marks the beginning of the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s from either the Netscape Communications initial public offering of 1995 or Alan Greenspan's quot;irrational exuberancequot; speech of 1996. We believe that this is wrong: we see little...

Large long-run swings in the United States stock market over the past century correspond to swings in estimates of fundamental values calculated by using a long moving average of past dividend growth to forecast future growth rates. Such a procedure would have been reasonable if investors were...

Over the past century the long-run growth of six economies shows a strong association between investment in machinery and economic growth that holds both within and across nations and periods. A similar strong association holds for the post-world War II period for a broader cross section of...

The major bull and bear markets of this century have suggested to many that large decade-to-decade stock market swings reflect irrational quot;fads and fashionsquot; that periodically sweep investors. We argue instead that investors have perceived significant shifts in the long-run mean rate of...

Closed-end mutual funds provide one of the few cases in which economists can observe quot;fundamentalquot; values directly, and compare them to market values: the fundamental value of a closed-end fund is simply the net asset value of its portfolio. We use the difference between prices and asset...

This paper uses long-run real price and dividends series to investigate for the German stock market the questions asked of the U.S. market by Shiller (1989). It tries to determine in what periods and to what degree the German stock market has also possessed excess volatility' in the past...

We consider the puzzling behavior of interest rates and inflation in the United States and the United Kingdom between 1879 and 1913. A deflationary regime prior to 1896 was followed by an inflationary one from 1896 until the beginning of World War I; the average inflation rate was 3.8 percentage...

This paper uses Taylor's model of overlapping contracts to show that increased wage and price flexibility can easily be destabilizing. This result arises because of the Mundell effect. While lower prices increase output, the expectation of falling prices decreases output. Simulations based on...