Asset Bubbles: Re-thinking Policy for the Age of Asset Management

Bradley Jones

No 2015/027, IMF Working Papers from International Monetary Fund

Abstract: 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.

Keywords: WP; asset bubble; monetary policy; asset price; asset market; Asset bubbles; Financial stability; Macroprudential policy; market capitalization; asset boom; earnings yield; cost of capital; asset price movement; asset price determination; drive asset price; asset price inflation; valuation misalignment; asset price increase; bubble model; asset bubble model; Asset prices; Asset management; Financial sector stability; Stock markets; Global (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 59
Date: 2015-02-11
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

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