This work attempts to make a breakthrough in the empirical research of market inefficiency by introducing a new approach, the value frontier method, to estimate the magnitude of stock bubbles, which has been an interesting topic that has attracted a lot of research attention in the past. The theoretical framework stems from the basic argument of Blanchard & Watson’s (1982) rational expectation of asset value that should be equal to the fundamental value of the stock, and the argument of Scheinkman & Xiong (2003) and Hong, Scheinkman & Xiong (2006) that bubbles are formed by heterogeneous beliefs which can be refined as the optimism effect and the resale option effect. The applications of the value frontier methodology are demonstrated in this work at the market level and the firm level respectively. The estimated bubbles at the market level enable us to analyse bubble changes over time among 37 countries across the world, which helps further examine the relationship between economic factors (e.g. inflation) and bubbles. Firm-level bubbles are estimated in two developed markets, the US and the UK, as well as one emerging market, China. We found that the market-average bubble is less volatile than industry-level bubbles. This finding provides a compelling explanation to the failure of many existing studies in testing the existence of bubbles at the whole market level. In addition, the significant decreasing trend of Chinese bubbles and their co-moving tendency with the UK and the US markets offer us evidence in support of our argument that even in an immature market, investors can improve their investment perceptions towards rationality by learning not only from previous experience but also from other opened markets. Furthermore, following the arguments of “sustainable bubbles” from Binswanger (1999) and Scheinkman & Xiong (2003), we reinforce their claims at the end that a market with bubbles can also be labelled efficient; in particular, it has three forms of efficiency. First, a market without bubbles is completely efficient from the perspective of investors’ responsiveness to given information; secondly, a market with “sustainable bubbles” (bubbles that co-move with the economy), which results from rational responses to economic conditions, is in the strong form of information-responsive efficiency; thirdly, a market with “non-sustainable bubbles”, i.e. the bubble changes are not linked closely with economic foundations, is in the weak form of information-responsive efficiency.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:501578 |
| Date | January 2006 |
| Creators | Yang, Qian |
| Contributors | Liu, G. |
| Publisher | Brunel University |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://bura.brunel.ac.uk/handle/2438/3597 |
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