During the early 1990s, asset prices and investment were unusually weak throughout the industrial world. This paper highlights this stylized fact, and connects it with another: in most of the industrial world, asset markets boomed for several years before collapsing around 1989. The paper...

This paper presents evidence that speculative bubbles can have sizeable effects on house prices, and on housing investment. We infer that deviations of asset prices from fundamental values may have serious consequences for real activity, and explore some policy implications. The analysis relies...