Anna Scherbina

Asset Price Bubbles: A selective survey

Why do asset price bubbles continue to appear in various markets? This paper provides an overview of recent literature on bubbles, with significant attention given to behavioral models and rational models with frictions. Unlike the standard rational models, the new literature is able to model the common characteristics of historical bubble episodes and offer insights for how bubbles are initiated and sustained, the reasons they burst, and why arbitrage forces do not routinely step in to squash them. The latest U.S. real estate bubble is described in the context of this literature.

Asset Price Bubbles: A Survey

Why do asset price bubbles continue to appear in various markets? What types of events give rise to bubbles and why do arbitrage forces fail to quickly burst them? Do bubbles have real economic consequences and should policy makers do more to prevent them? This paper provides an overview of recent literature on bubbles, with significant attention given to behavioral models and rational models with frictions. The latest U.S. real estate bubble is described in the context of this literature.

Real Estate Prices During the Roaring Twenties and the Great Depression

Using new data on market-based transactions we construct real estate price indexes for Manhattan between 1920 and 1939. During the 1920s prices reached their highest level in the third quarter of 1929 before falling by 67 percent at the end of 1932 and hovering around that value for most of the Great Depression. The value of high-end properties strongly co-moved with the stock market between 1929 and 1932. A typical property bought in 1920 would have retained only 56 percent of its initial value in nominal terms two decades later. An investment in the stock market index (including dividends) would have outperformed an investment in a typical property (including net rental income), by a factor of 5.2 over our time period.

Unusual News Events and the Cross-Section of Stock Returns

We show that stocks that experience a sudden increase in idiosyncratic volatility earn abnormally high contemporaneous returns but significantly underperform otherwise similar stocks in the future. Our findings indicate that volatility shocks can be traced to unusual firm-level news. We conjecture that these unusual news events increase the level of investor disagreement about firms’ fundamental values. Because short-selling of highly volatile stocks is costly, prices rise to reflect the more optimistic views but then revert down as investors’ opinions start to converge. The observed patterns of trade order imbalances and changes in investor disagreement lend support for this hypothesis.

Asset Bubbles: an Application to Residential Real Estate

Behavioural models offer new insights into why bubbles are ubiquitous in residential real estate markets. These markets are dominated by unsophisticated households who often develop optimistic views by extrapolating from past returns. Rational investors cannot easily trade against an overvaluation of housing assets because of high transaction costs and a binding short sale constraint. Circumventing the effect of the latter, the supply of housing frequently increases in response to rising prices. This helps to mitigate bubbles but often leads to overbuilding, which slows down the recovery after a bubble bursts. Models that incorporate the effects of perverse incentives and limits to arbitrage are especially helpful in explaining the bubble that developed in mortgage‐backed securities and helped fuel the recent real estate bubble by relaxing home buyers’ borrowing constraints. The literature is ambiguous about whether governments should intervene to burst bubbles, as a better response may lie in improving incentives of key market players.

Real Estate Prices During the Roaring Twenties and the Great Depression: Real Estate Prices During the Great Depression

Using new data on market�?based transactions we construct real estate price indexes for Manhattan between 1920 and 1939. During the 1920s prices reached their highest level in the third quarter of 1929 before falling by 67% at the end of 1932 and hovering around that value for most of the Great Depression. The value of high�?end properties strongly co�?moved with the stock market between 1929 and 1932. A typical property bought in 1920 would have retained only 56% of its initial value in nominal terms two decades later. An investment in the stock market index (including dividends) would have outperformed an investment in a typical property (including net rental income) by a factor of 5.2 over our time period.

Economic Linkages Inferred from News Stories and the Predictability of Stock Returns

We show that news stories contain information about economic linkages between firms and document that information diffuses slowly across linked stocks. Specifically, we identify linked stocks from co-mentions in news stories and find that linked stocks cross-predict one anothers returns in the future. Our results indicate that information can flow from smaller to larger stocks and across industries. Content analysis of common news stories reveals many types of firm linkages that have not been previously studied. We find that the cross-predictability in returns remains even after firm pairs with customer-supplier ties are removed. Results show that both limited attention and slow processing of complex information contribute to slow information diffusion.

Performance Isn't Everything: Personal Characteristics and Career Outcomes of Mutual Fund Managers

We investigate the determinants of mutual fund manager career outcomes. We find that, although career outcomes are largely determined by past performance, measured by returns and fund flows, personal attributes also factor in. All else equal, female managers are less likely to be promoted and have shorter tenures than male fund managers. This finding applies to a greater extent to women who co-manage funds with other managers, which suggests that working in teams negatively affects womens careers when compared to mens. Moreover, we show that, all else equal, younger managers, U.S.-educated managers, and managers who attended elite schools experience better career outcomes than otherwise similar managers.