Some booms in housing prices are followed by busts. Others are not. It is generally difficult to find observable fundamentals that are useful for predicting whether a boom will turn into a bust or not. We develop a model consistent with these observations. Agents have heterogeneous expectations about long-run fundamentals but change their views because of “social dynamics.” Agents with tighter priors are more likely to convert others to their beliefs. Boom-bust episodes typically occur when skeptical agents happen to be correct. The booms that are not followed by busts typically occur when optimistic agents happen to be correct.

This paper argues that a principal cause of the 1997 Asian currency crisis was large prospective deficits associated with implicit bailout guarantees to failing banking systems. The expectation that these future deficits would be at least partially financed by seigniorage revenues or an inflation tax on outstanding nominal debt led to a collapse of the fixed exchange rate regimes in Asia. We articulate this view using a simple model whose key feature is that a speculative attack is inevitable once the present value of future government deficits rises. We present empirical evidence in support of the key assumptions underlying our interpretation of the crisis.

This paper investigates the sensitivity of Solow residual based measures of technology shocks to labor-hoarding behavior. Using a structural model of labor hoarding and the identifying restriction that innovations to technology shocks are orthogonal to innovations in government consumption, the authors estimate the fraction of the variability of the Solow residual that is due to technology shocks. Their results support the view that a significant proportion of movements in the Solow residual are artifa cts of labor-hoarding behavior. Specifically, the authors estimate that the variance of innovations to technology is roughly 50 percent less than that implied by standard real business cycle models. Copyright 1993 by University of Chicago Press.