Rational Speculative Bubbles: Evidence from Asian Stock Markets

Abstract

We scrutinize China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Philippines, South Korea, Taiwan, and Thailand for the presence of rational bubbles by employing several tests on a large dataset that includes three bubble episodes. We also convert most tests into recursive to overcome structural breaks in the data that improve a bubble’s detection. The unit root tests exhibit bubbles in all markets while the sup augmented Dickey-Fuller test suggests Hong Kong, Japan, and Thailand exhibit an explosive process. The cointegration tests show that Hong Kong, Japan, Malaysia, and Thailand may have bubbles while the explosiveness test shows evidence of bubbles in all markets for both weekly and monthly data. However, the duration dependence test identifies bubbles in six (two) Asian markets for weekly (monthly) returns. Thus, our results suggest that the rational bubble tests are enhanced from recursive tests using a large dataset that includes multiple bubble episodes.