TY  - JOUR
AU  - Long,J. Bradford De
AU  - Shleifer,Andrei
TI  - The Bubble of 1929:  Evidence from Closed-End Funds
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 3523
PY  - 1990
Y2  - December 1990
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w3523
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w3523.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
J. Bradford DeLong
Department of Economics
601 Evans Hall
University of California, Berkeley
Berkeley, CA 94720-3880
Tel: 510/643-4027
Fax: 510/642-6615
E-Mail: delong@econ.berkeley.edu

Andrei Shleifer
Department of Economics
Harvard University
Littauer Center M-9
Cambridge, MA 02138
Tel: 617/495-5046
Fax: 617/496-1708
E-Mail: ashleifer@harvard.edu
AB  - Closed-end mutual funds provide one of the few cases in which economists can observe "fundamental" values directly, and compare them to market values: the fundamental value of a closed-end fund is simply the net asset value of its portfolio. We use the difference between prices and asset values of closed-end funds at the end of the 1920s as a measure of investment sentiment. In the late l920s closed-end funds sold at large premia: at the peak, they appear willing to pay 60 percent more for closed-end funds than the post-WWII norm. Such substantial overpricing of closed-end funds -- where fundamentals are known and observed -- suggests that other assets were selling at prices above fundamentals as well. The association between movements in the medium closed-end fund discount and movements in broad stock price indices leads us to conclude that the stocks making up the S & P composite were priced at least 30 percent above fundamentals in the summer of 1929.
ER  -