Essays on speculative financial bubbles

This thesis contributes to the study of long-run relationships between financial assets. We develop a methodology for testing the hypothesis of co-bubbling behaviour in two series, employing a variant of the stationarity test of Kwiatkowski et al. (1992) which uses a conditional 'wild' bootsrap scheme to control size. We subsequently use our method to test for the presence of co-bubbles in a series of different markets. We look at commodities such as gold and silver and the housing market. There is a plethora of research on the efficacy of unit root tests for detecting explosive rational asset price bubbles. However, the migration of these bubbles and the possibility of co-bubbling behaviour of two series have seldom been researched. In the second chapter of this thesis we apply our model to the commodities market and find that the prices of gold and silver co-bubble in the period following the financial crisis. In the third chapter we investigate the migration of speculative housing bubbles between UK geographic regions. In the third chapter we analyse the co-bubbling relationship between rental and housing prices. We find that an explosive bubble behaviour in rental prices will lead to a bubble behaviour in house prices. The two series co-bubble over a period of time of around two years

Testing for Co-explosive Behaviour in Financial Time Series

This article proposes a test to determine if two price series that each contain an explosive autoregressive regime consistent with the presence of a bubble are related in the sense that a linear combination of them is integrated of order zero. We refer to such a phenomenon as ‘co-explosive behaviour’, and propose a test based on a stationarity testing framework. The test allows the explosive episode in one series to lead (or lag) that in the other by a number of time periods. We establish the asymptotic properties of the test statistic and propose a wild bootstrap procedure for obtaining critical values that are robust to heteroskedasticity. Simulations show that the proposed test has good finite sample size and power performance. An empirical application to detect whether co-explosive behaviour exists among a set of precious and non-ferrous metals is presented

Essays on speculative financial bubbles

This thesis contributes to the study of long-run relationships between financial assets. We develop a methodology for testing the hypothesis of co-bubbling behaviour in two series, employing a variant of the stationarity test of Kwiatkowski et al. (1992) which uses a conditional 'wild' bootsrap scheme to control size. We subsequently use our method to test for the presence of co-bubbles in a series of different markets. We look at commodities such as gold and silver and the housing market. There is a plethora of research on the efficacy of unit root tests for detecting explosive rational asset price bubbles. However, the migration of these bubbles and the possibility of co-bubbling behaviour of two series have seldom been researched. In the second chapter of this thesis we apply our model to the commodities market and find that the prices of gold and silver co-bubble in the period following the financial crisis. In the third chapter we investigate the migration of speculative housing bubbles between UK geographic regions. In the third chapter we analyse the co-bubbling relationship between rental and housing prices. We find that an explosive bubble behaviour in rental prices will lead to a bubble behaviour in house prices. The two series co-bubble over a period of time of around two years