TY  - JOUR
AU  - Rappoport,Peter
AU  - White,Eugene N.
TI  - Was there a bubble in the 1929 Stock Market?
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 3612
PY  - 1991
Y2  - February 1991
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w3612
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w3612.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Eugene N. White
Department of Economics
Rutgers University
75 Hamilton Street
New Brunswick, NJ 08901-1248
Tel: 732-932-7363
Fax: 732/932-7416
E-Mail: white@economics.rutgers.edu
AB  - Standard tests find that no bubbles are present in the stock price data for the last one hundred years. In contrast., historical accounts, focusing on briefer periods, point to the stock market of 1928-1929 as a classic example of a bubble. While previous studies have restricted their attention to the joint behavior of stock prices and dividends over the course of a century, this paper uses the behavior of the premia demanded on loans collateralized by the purchase of stocks to evaluate the claim that the boom and crash of 1929 represented a bubble. We develop a model that permits us to extract an estimate of the path of the bubble and its probability of bursting in any period and demonstrate that the premium behaves as would be expected in the presence of a bubble in stock prices. We also find that our estimate of the bubble's path has explanatory power when added to the standard cointegrating regressions of stock prices and dividends, in spite of the fact that our stock price and dividend series are cointegrated.
ER  -