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Journal Article
Brewing bubbles: how mortgage practices intensify housing booms
Even before the Great Recession, housing market bubbles have been associated with severe financial crises around the world. Why do these booms and busts occur? Leonard Nakamura explains that part of the answer may lie with how mortgage lending practices appear to respond to rising and falling house prices in somewhat unexpected ways.
Working Paper
Bubbles and Stagnation
This paper studies the consequences of asset bubbles for economies that are vulnerable to persistent stagnation. Stagnation is the result of a shortage of assets that creates an oversupply of savings and puts downward pressure on the level of interest rates. Once the zero lower bound on the nominal interest rate binds, the real rate cannot fully adjust downward, forcing output to fall instead. In such context, bubbles are useful as they expand the supply of assets, absorb excess savings and raise the natural interest rate - the real rate that is compatible with full employment - crowding in ...
Journal Article
Bubbles and Fools
This article reviews the literature on greater-fool theories of bubbles, which argue that bubbles can arise if traders are willing to buy assets they know to be overvalued because they hope to later sell them at a profit to others. The author discusses two approaches that attempt to model this phenomenon and what these approaches imply for economic policy.
Working Paper
Bubbles and the Value of Innovation
Episodes of booming innovation coincide with intense speculation in financial markets leading to bubbles—increases in market valuations and firm creation followed by a crash. We provide a framework reproducing these facts that makes a rich set of predictions on how speculation changes both the private and social values of innovation. We confirm the theory in the universe of U.S. patents issued from 1926 through 2010. Measures based on financial market information indicate that speculation increases the private value of innovation and reduces negative spillovers to competing firms. No ...