The share of equity issues in total new equity and debt issues is a strong predictor of U.S. stock market returns between 1928 and 1997. In particular, firms issue relatively more equity than debt just before periods of low market returns. The equity share in new issues has stable predictive power in both halves of the sample period and after controlling for other known predictors. We do not find support for efficient market explanations of the results. Instead, the fact that the equity share sometimes predicts significantly negative market returns suggests inefficiency and that firms time the market component of their returns when issuing securities.

This paper presents evidence on two types of investor attitudes that change in important ways through time, with important consequences for speculative markets. The paper explores changes in bubble expectations and investor confidence among institutional investors in the U.S. stock market at six-month intervals for the period 1989 to 1998 and for individual investors at the start and end of this period. Based on the results of the questionnaires administered during the period, the author develops specific time-series indicators for each of the following: a speculative bubble (an unstable situation with expectations for a increase in the short term only), a negative speculative bubble (an unstable situation with expectations for a downturn in the short term only), and investor confidence (a feeling that nothing can go wrong). Using the indicators, the author produces indexes indicating the average percentage of the population at a given time with bubble expectations, negative bubble expectations, and investor confidence, respectively. The paper examines the behavior of indicators and indexes through time and compares the indexes with

This paper surveys American business cycles over the past century. Its task is to identify the causes of these cycles; other papers in this collection address the nature of policy responses to these causes. This paper can be seen as a test to discriminate between two views of the American economy. The first is expressed in a characteristically vivid statement by Dornbusch, who proclaimed recently: “None of the U.S. expansions of the past 40 years died in bed of old age; every one was murdered by the Federal Reserve ” (Dornbusch 1997). This stark view can be contrasted with its opposite in the recent literature: “[N]one of the popular candidates for observable shocks robustly accounts for the bulk of business-cycle fluctuations in output ” (Cochrane 1994, p. 358). I expand the time period to consider the past century, but it is easy to distinguish the past 40 years, that is, the period since World War II. A survey of business cycle causes over an entire century runs into several problems, of which three seem noteworthy. First, it is not at all clear what “cause ” means in this context. Second, the Great Depression was such a large cycle that it cannot be seen as just another data point. Third, the survey relies on the existing literature on business cycles, which is why I have entitled it an essay in economic historiography. The paper proceeds by discussing each of these problems in turn, then turning to the data, and finally drawing some conclusions from the preceding efforts.

of the United States. We use the ratio of income taxes to net income from Historical Statistics (series Y-389 divided by series Y-388) for 1909-52, which marks the inception of the corporate income tax. A ratio splice in 1953 adjusts for dierences between net and taxable incomes that make the denominators of the tax rate measures not directly comparable across data sources.

This paper studies asset price bubbles in a continuous time model using the local martingale framework. Providing careful definitions of the asset’s market and fundamental price, we characterize all possible price bubbles in an incomplete market satisfying the ”no free lunch with vanishing risk” and ”no dominance” assumptions. We propose a new theory for bubble birth which involves a nontrivial modification of the classical framework. We show that the two leading models for bubbles as either charges or as strict local martingales, respectively, are equivalent. Finally, we investigate the pricing of derivative securities in the presence of asset price bubbles, and we show that: (i) European put options can have no bubbles, (ii) European call options and discounted forward prices can have bubbles, but the magnitude of their bubbles must equal the magnitude of the asset’s price bubble, (iii) with no dividends, American call prices must always equal an otherwise identical European call’s price, regardless of bubbles, (iv) European put-call parity in market prices must always hold, regardless of bubbles, and (v) futures price bubbles can exist and they are independent of bubbles in the underlying asset’s price. These results imply that in a market satisfying NFLVR and no dominance, in the presence of an asset price bubble, risk neutral valuation can not be used to match call option prices. We propose, but do not implement, some new tests for the existence of asset price bubbles using derivative securities.

We experimentally explore if the absence of dividend anchors (from which investors can backward induct to arrive at the fundamental value) may help us understand the formation of security price bubbles. The fundamental value models assume that the investors (a) form rational expectations, (b) form higher-order beliefs, (c) the security matures in finite time, and (d) that these three conditions are common knowledge among the investors. We argue that when the deviation of security markets from these assumptions deprives the investors of any reasonable way of backward inducting the fundamental value of a security from its future dividends, its price is susceptible to floating freely. We create laboratory markets with exogenously and endogenously specified terminal values, and examine whether the absence of a dividend anchor generates price deviations from the fundamentals. We find that such deviations occur in sessions where it is difficult for investors to backward induct value from dividends. Bubble price levels appear to be indeterminate, and price predictions follow a first-order adaptive or trend process. These processes are consistent with the conjecture that the investors resort to forward induction when backward induction becomes difficult or impossible. Under these conditions, the allocative efficiency and the cross-sectional dispersion of wealth also become indeterminate, as compared to high efficiency and low dispersion in the absence of bubbles. JEL classification: G12; C91 Keywords: stock price bubbles, beauty contests, common knowledge, and market experiments 3 Investor Beliefs and Price Bubbles sans Dividend Anchors 1.

Closed-end country funds trade in New York at their price. Their Net Asset Value (NAV) represent the value of the underlying assets, usually traded in each particular country. If the holders of the underlying assets have more information the about local assets than the country fund holders, changes in NAVs will tend to explain future changes in prices but not vice versa. This paper shows that most NAVs appear exogenous; while most prices reject exogeneity. Past changes in NAVs and discounts predict current prices more frequently than prices and discounts predict NAVs. The price (NAV) adjustment coefficients are low and negatively correlated with the local (foreign) market variability--but not with the fund price (NAV) variability. These findings are consistent with the existence of asymmetric information in international capital markets. The appendix introduces a model of asymmetric information, that rationalizes our empirical findings. Different perceived risk makes foreign investors willing to less pay for local assets than domestic investors. Therefore, country fund prices (driven mainly by small U.S. investors) tend to be lower than NAVs (driven mainly by domestic and large foreign investors). Two other propositions are derived. First, since NAVs and prices are linked by a long-run

The discount on closed-end funds is widely accepted as proof of investor irrationality. We show, to the contrary, that a very simple parsimonious rational model can generate a discount that exhibits the behavior observed in practice. The only required features of the model are that managers have (imperfectly observable) ability to generate excess returns; they sign long-term contracts guaranteeing them a fee each year equal to a fixed fraction of assets under management; and they can leave to earn more money elsewhere if they turn out to be good. With these assumptions, time-varying discounts are not an anomaly in a rational world with competitive investors – they are required. JEL classification: G14. 1