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The purpose of this paper is to offer a critique of government intervention in the production of biofuel in northern Sweden and Finland, highlighting some of the welfare consequences.

After a short review of government interventions, including laws, taxes and subsidies, Austrian economic principles are applied, which lead to universal statements about the impacts of government intervention.

Government intervention on behalf of the biofuel production industry leads to the emergence of an investment bubble, with consequential negative impacts on welfare.

The paper informs about the true costs of intervention in biofuel production, which suggests that policy makers may abstain from justifying interventions for the sake of increasing people's welfare.

The paper contributes to the research of the production impacts of a new energy technology in the form of biofuel in particular and of governmental intervention in production in general. The paper, furthermore, enhances the use of the method and theory of the Austrian school of economic science.

This paper attempts to provide novel approaches and tools for the analysis and measurement of stock bubbles.

The study is based on the perspective of a generalized virtual economy and the circulation process of accumulation strengthening and exclusion in the stock noise and is based on the symmetric chain model of the evolutionary game of combination of stock markets. Based on the stable ratio of the rational and irrational investors and the asymptotically stable strategy of the model in the two cases, the paper uses the improved classic model of noise trading (DSSW) to calculate the irrational bubbles on the Shanghai stock market.

The paper shows that the more irrational investors are, the higher the irrational bubbles are.

The method exposed in the paper can be used to study the formation mechanism of the stock market bubble, to analyze the impact of investors' behaviours, to measure the size of irrational bubbles and to put forward some reasonable policy recommendations and preventive measures.

The paper succeeds in pointing out a new stock market's irrational bubble calculation model on the basis of evolutionary game chain structure, and thus measures the size of the Shanghai stock market bubble and makes some tentative research and discussion about the evolution law of the stock market's irrational bubble.

This study aims to examine the impact of stock mispricing on corporate investment decisions by taking the sample of non-financial firms listed on the Pakistan Stock Exchange during the period of 2008-2014.

To measure the mispricing, this study decomposes the market-to-book ratio into mispricing and growth components and measures corporate investment by capital expenditures. Fixed and random effect panel regression models are used to estimate the results.

Results of the study show that firms issue overvalued equity to finance the capital expenditures. Consistent with other studies, the relationship between stock mispricing and investment is more prominent in the financially constrained firms. In addition, cash flow investment sensitivity is higher in financially unconstrained firms.

Nonetheless, the results give important implications to the Pakistan Stock Market on how the mispricing enhances the welfare by relaxing the financial constraints and allowing the managers to make investment in profitable projects that otherwise go non-funded. These findings have interesting implications for further research in the literature of finance and also help in economic policy-making.

This study finds the impact of stock mispricing on corporate investment decisions by considering the role of market timing in the context of Pakistan.

The purpose of this paper is to re‐examine the relationship between real investment and stock prices for the USA for 1960‐2005 in view of distinct economic regimes during the 40‐year period.

The paper employs simple models of investment, checks for cointegration, and applies the value at risk (VAR) methodology.

First, it was found that during the 1960‐1990 period investment and the stock market exhibited a good relationship and shared a common stochastic trend. Second, during the 1990‐2005 period this relationship broke down. Finally, extending the model to include the long‐term interest rate did not produce significant impacts on or feedbacks from and to either variable. It is concluded that the 1990‐2005 period has been distinct from the previous periods in that the stock market did not always abide by the fundamentals such as interest rates and/or investment expenditures. It is thus concluded that the high stock market growth rates of the 1990s have adversely impacted real investment expenditures.

Lack of influence of the real long‐term interest rate on either the investment of the stock price equations for the 1990‐2005 period. This implies that both investment and the stock market did not “take into account” a fundamental variable, the discount rate, instead they had a run on their own (especially the stock market).

The value of the paper is in showing that interest rates and investment expenditures do not always move as economic theory predicts or that economic fundamentals do not always rule.

The purpose of this paper is to trace the history and legacy of Islamic finance (IF) in Sri Lanka in the context of the emergence of life finance. It tracks the social life of finance through a genealogy of trust and capital.

The methodology used is qualitative. It is an extended case study using conversations, company documents and newspaper archival research.

Trust, transparency and ethics must be understood locally to have salience. The implicit effect of locally understood ideas of trust that have been built into the movement of capital (via ethical branding and transparency in IF, education and social awareness) can reconfigure relationships between communities in a country that has been ravaged by war.

There have been few studies on IF in Sri Lanka; this study will enrich those offerings. However, they must be understood in relation to the emergence of life finance.

This study presents a new viewpoint on the relationship between finance and social well-being and new categories through which to understand finance.

The implicit effect of locally understood ideas of trust which have been built into movements of capital (via ethical branding and transparency in IF, education, socially aware) can reconfigure relationships between communities in a country that has been ravaged by war.

There have been few studies on Islamic Finance in Sri Lanka; this study will enrich those offerings. But they must be understood in relation to the emergence of life-finance in South Asia.

In this study, to maximize returns and minimize investment risk, an attempt was made to form an optimal portfolio under conditions where the capital market has a price bubble. According to the purpose, the research was of the applied type, in terms of data, quantitative and postevent, and in terms of the type of analysis, it was of the descriptive-correlation type. Sequence, skewness and kurtosis tests were used to identify the months with bubbles from 2015 to 2021 in the Tehran Stock Exchange. After identifying the bubble courses, artificial bee colony meta-heuristic and invasive weed algorithms were used to optimize the portfolio. The purpose of this paper is to address these issues.

The existence of bubbles in the market, especially in the capital market, can prevent the participation of investors in the capital market process and the correct allocation of financial resources for the economic development of the country. However, due to the goal of investors to achieve a portfolio of high returns with the least amount of risk, there is need to pay attention to these markets increases.

The results identify 14 periods of price bubbles during the study period. Additionally, stock portfolios with maximum returns and minimum risk were selected for portfolio optimization. According to the results of using meta-heuristic algorithms to optimize the portfolio, in relation to the obtained returns and risk, no significant difference was observed between the returns and risk of periods with price bubbles in each of the two meta-heuristic algorithms. This study can guide investors in identifying bubble courses and forming an optimal portfolio under these conditions.

One of the limitations of this research is the non-generalizability of the findings to stock exchanges of other countries and other time periods due to the condition of the price bubble, as well as other companies in the stock market due to the restrictions considered for selecting the statistical sample.

This study intends to form an optimal stock portfolio in a situation where the capital market suffers from a price bubble. This study provides an effective and practical solution for investors in the field of stock portfolio optimization.

The purpose of this paper is to test for the presence of bubbles in the US lodging/hotel real estate investment trust (REIT) subsector from 1994 to 2016. It also compares the profitability of a buy-and-hold strategy with several technical trading rules when applied to lodging REITs.

To investigate speculative bubbles, the sequential right-sided unit root tests of Phillips, Shi and Yu (2015a, b) are used.

The results confirm the possibility of the existence of multiple bubbles and explosive behavior in prices and the price-dividend ratio. One of the detected bubbles coincides with the financial economic crisis of 2008 using both measures. In addition, several technical rules are found to be superior to a naïve buy-and-hold strategy even after adjusting for risk.

These findings will be of interest to policy makers, who can use such models as an early alert to take anticipative action to avoid bursting of bubbles and consequent negative effects on the economy. The findings also provide important information to investors attempting to devise trading rules that utilize the signals from bubble detection, as well as to hotel executives devising policies aimed at reducing risk and creating more firm value to maximize shareholder wealth. Moreover, valuation and bubbles are important to lenders and creditors who use assets as collaterals for financing hotel REITs.

Hotels are a unique hybrid of retail and housing that combine operating business with real estate. This paper is the first to investigate speculative bubbles in lodging REITs.

This paper aims to investigate the presence of a housing bubble using Swedish data from 1986Q1-2016Q4 by using various methods.

First, the authors use affordability indicators and asset-pricing approaches, including the price-to-income ratio, price-to-rent ratio and user cost, supplemented by a qualitative discussion of other factors affecting house prices. Second, the authors use cointegration techniques to compute the fundamental (or long-run) price, which is then compared with the actual price to test the degree of Sweden’s housing price bubble during the studied period. Third, they apply the univariate right-tailed unit root test procedure to capture bursting bubbles and to date-stamp bubbles.

The authors find evidence for rational housing bubbles with explosive behavioral components beginning in 2004. These bubbles do not continuously diverge but instead periodically revert to their fundamental value. However, the deviation is persistent, and without any policy correction, it takes decades for real house prices to return to equilibrium.

The policy implication is that monetary policy designed to contain mortgage demand and thereby prevent burst episodes in the housing market must address external imbalances, as revealed in real exchange rate undervaluation. It is unlikely that current policies will stop the rise of house prices, as the growth of mortgage credit, improvement in Sweden’s international competitiveness and the path of interest rates are much more important factors.

The occurrence and unpredictability of speculative bubbles on financial markets, and their accompanying crashes, have confounded economists and economic historians worldwide. The purpose of this paper is to diagnose and detect the bursting of shipping bubbles ex ante, and to qualify the patterns of shipping price dynamics and the bubble mechanics, so that appropriate counter measures can be taken in advance to reduce side effects arising from bubbles.

Log periodic power law (LPPL) model, developed in the past decade, is used to detect large market falls or “crashes” through modeling of the shipping price dynamics on a selection of three historical shipping bubbles over the period of 1985 to 2016. The method is based on a nonlinear least squares estimation that yields predictions of the most probable time of the regime switching.

It could be concluded that predictions by the LPPL model are quite dependent on the time at which they are conducted. Interestingly, the LPPL model could have predicted the substantial fall in the Baltic Dry Index during the recent global downturn, but not all crashes in the past. It is also found that the key ingredient that sets off an unsustainable growth process for shipping prices is the positive feedback. When the positive feedback starts, the burst of bubbles in shipping would be influenced by both endogenous and exogenous factors, which are crucial for the advanced warning of the market conversion.

The LPPL model has been first applied into the dry bulk shipping market to test a couple of shipping bubbles. The authors not only assess the predictability and robustness of the LPPL model but also expand the understanding of the model and explain patterns of shipping price dynamics and bubble mechanics.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a decision support model for the early diagnosis of housing bubbles in the UK during the maturity process of the phenomenon.

The development process of the model is divided into four stages. These stages are driven by the normal distribution theorem coupled with the case study approach. The application of normal distribution theory is allowed through the usage of several parametric tools. The case studies tested in this research include the last two UK housing bubbles, 1986 to 1989 and 2001/2002 to 2007. The central hypothesis of the model is that during housing bubbles, all speculative activities of market participants follow an approximate synchronisation, and therefore, an irrational, synchronous and periodic increase on a wide range of relevant variables must occur to anticipate the bubble component. An empirical application of the model is conducted on UK housing market data over the period of 1983-2011.

The new approach successfully identifies the well-known UK historical bubble episodes over the period of 1983-2011. The study further determines that for uncovering housing bubbles in the UK, house price changes have the same weight with the debt–burden ratio when their velocity is positive. Finally, the application of this model has led us to conclude that the model’s outputs fluctuate approximately in line with phases of the UK real estate cycle.

This paper proposes a new measure for studying the presence of housing bubbles. This measure is not simply an ex post detection technique but dating algorithms that use data only up to the point of analysis for an on-going bubble assessment, giving an early warning diagnostic that can assist market participants and regulators in market monitoring.