Author : Bradley Jones
Publisher : International Monetary Fund
ISBN 13 : 1498367801
Total Pages : 59 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (983 download)
Book Synopsis Asset Bubbles by : Bradley Jones
Download or read book Asset Bubbles written by Bradley Jones and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 2015-02-11 with total page 59 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In distilling a vast literature spanning the rational— irrational divide, this paper offers reflections on why asset bubbles continue to threaten economic stability despite financial markets becoming more informationally-efficient, more complete, and more heavily influenced by sophisticated (i.e. presumably rational) institutional investors. Candidate explanations for bubble persistence—such as limits to learning, frictional limits to arbitrage, and behavioral errors—seem unsatisfactory as they are inconsistent with the aforementioned trends impacting global capital markets. In lieu of the short-term nature of the asset owner—manager relationship, and the momentum bias inherent in financial benchmarks, I argue that the business risk of asset managers acts as strong motivation for institutional herding and ‘rational bubble-riding.’ Two key policy implications follow. First, procyclicality could intensify as institutional assets under management continue to grow. Second, remedial policies should extend beyond the standard suite of macroprudential and monetary measures to include time-invariant policies targeted at the cause (not just symptom) of the problem. Prominent among these should be reforms addressing principal-agent contract design and the implementation of financial benchmarks.