Search results

This study aims to report on experimental asset markets designed to examine the impact of a levy on trade, as well as the taxation authority’s ability to raise tax revenue when markets are subject to mispricing. Some have suggested that a transaction tax will discourage irrational speculation and lead to more efficient markets, but others argue that a higher cost of trading will prove to be an impediment to trade with no useful outcomes.

The authors’ goal is to provide insight on the impact of a transaction tax in a very specific asset market. The authors chose this design because the robustness of the bubble and crash pattern points to an environment that is particularly appropriate for the study of the effectiveness of a transaction tax in promoting efficient pricing. Furthermore, in a laboratory, the authors can control for extraneous factors that are problematic in the study of naturally occurring environments.

The authors examine whether a securities transaction tax promotes efficiency in markets that are prone to mispricing and find little evidence that a tax on trade will reduce speculation.

This study’s experimental environment is, of course, an abstraction of naturally occurring markets and it may be that the model excludes important aspects.

The authors find that a tax on financial transactions allows the taxation authority to raise significant revenue with little impact on pricing or trading volume.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first systematic examination of a transaction tax on outcomes in a market that is prone to mispricing.

Are share markets too volatile? While it is difficult to ignore share market volatility it is important to determine whether volatility is excessive. This paper replicates the Shiller (1981) test as well as applying standard time series analysis to annual Australian stock market data for the period 1883 to 1999. While Shiller’s test suggests the possibility of excess volatility, time series analysis identifies a long‐run relationship between share market value and dividends, consistent with the share market reverting to its fundamental discounted cash flow value over time.

Much of the author’s understanding of experimental asset market bubbles is based on the Smith, Suchanek and Williams (SSW) design. The purpose of this paper is to find alternative bubble-producing designs, which is a promising path for new insights.

The Smith et al. (1988) experimental design has been widely used to study bubbles. This paper introduces a novel modification, where the asset has a binary liquidation value and no dividends. Dividends are replaced by the events affecting the liquidation value probability distribution.

Overpricing is common and consistent with subject optimism concerning the random liquidation value. Bubbles are also observed, as the degree of overpricing often rises and then fall during the experiments. However, crashes where the asset price drops below fundamental values are not observed.

Subject over optimism, speculation and/or subject confusion are possible bubble ingredients. More research is needed to determine how much the factors responsible for these bubbles differ from the factors responsible for the SSW design. However, it seems likely that there are at least some common factors given the structural similarities between the two designs.

The present design is novel and may provide a means to better generalize results from previous experiments based on the SSW design.