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The upsurge of globalization has made investors cautious toward investing decisions, and, resultantly, sophisticated techniques of forecasting and analyzing the stock markets have emerged. Particularly, this trend has gained momentum in emerging economies. One such trend is to overcome the investing risks associated with formation of rational bubbles. Bubbles are formed when asset prices inflate to a very high level temporarily, and they ultimately burst. Investors may take advantage of this short-lived phenomenon and gain high returns, but may also suffer as the entire investing value declines when the bubble bursts. The purpose of this paper is to identify rational bubbles in the emerging capital markets of South Asian region.

The monthly data have been obtained from June 1997 to February 2018 for Pakistan, Bombay, Dhaka and Colombo stock markets, and supremum-Augmented Dicky Fuller test developed by Phillips and Yu (2011) has been utilized to identify the rational bubbles.

The results revealed the presence of rational bubbles in South Asian equity markets. The current study is of significant nature for the facilitation of investors in future-making investing decisions concerning with the formation of rational bubbles.

Several studies have been conducted on stock markets of developed regions. Specific bubble episodes, which occurred previously, have helped the researchers and investors in gaining plenty of insights. A lot of studies have been conducted on the SAARC region as well. But they have used the conventional unit root test for bubble identification and not used as extensive data as, in this study, have been taken. This research is aimed to study equity prices of the four stock markets to establish the fact that if rational bubbles exist in the index, they are reflected in the returns or not.

For approximately a century and a half after their dramatic deflation, the South Sea and Mississippi Bubbles of 1710–1720 had discredited finance. With the exception of government bond markets and a few chartered companies, the rapid rise and fall of fortunes associated with the South Sea Company, in Britain, and the Mississippi Company in France, had made the joint stock system of corporate finance almost synonymous with fraud and financial debauchery. (The most authoritative account of these schemes is given in Murphy, 1997.) The joint stock system of finance was seen as seriously flawed, and an indictment of the theories on credit money of the schemes’ instigator, John Law. During those one hundred and fifty years, classical political economy rose and flowered. Not surprisingly finance then came to be considered for its fiscal and monetary consequences. This pre-occupation left its mark on twentieth-century economics in an attitude that the fiscal and monetary implications of finance, eventually its influence on consumption, are more important than its balance sheet effects in the corporate sector. This attitude is apparent even in the work of perhaps the pre-eminent twentieth century critical finance theorist, John Maynard Keynes.

This article identifies the institutional factors behind both the emergence of a highly vulnerable financial system and the housing bubble that devastated it. The underlying premise is that the financial crisis was a market failure embedded in and caused by an institutional one. The failing institutions were academic, political and regulatory. The article shows how these institutions were fatally undermined, suggesting limits to the rationalization of finance capitalism. The perspective on financial crisis developed here recognizes the pressing need for reform of the financial markets, and also recommends institutional reforms as critical protections against future system failure.

German legal historians of nineteenth and twentieth centuries defined the main characteristics of the corporations and believed that one renaissance institution, the Casa di San Giorgio at Genoa (1407–1805), was similar to the corporations of later centuries. This paper proposes to reverse this perspective: did the founders of early modern corporations know the financial model of the fifteenth century Casa di San Giorgio? The research shows the connection between the model of the Casa di San Giorgio and the Mississippi Company of John Law (1720), the famous financial scheme and bubble. The history of the Casa di San Giorgio was mainly transmitted through a passage of Machiavelli’s History of Florence (VIII, 29). The paper offers new biographical evidence that Law had been to Genoa and introduces sources connecting the genesis of Law’s scheme for the Mississippi Company in France with the model of the Casa di San Giorgio.

Fraud is not yet universally recognised or understood as a crime, in the way that theft is. All sectors of our society recognise shoplifting as a crime, whereas an exaggerated insurance claim tends to be seen more as a matter of personal morality than public law and order.

This chapter examines the mass movement of Americans into investing during the 1990s as both a consequence and a cause of contested power between corporations and individuals. This movement was part of a larger historical pattern of economically marginalized people consolidating their power through associational strategies in the realm of finance. Using US investment clubs as a case study, the chapter draws on Foucault's theories to illuminate the bilateral power structure of modern capitalism, in which market institutions and small groups at the grassroots level mutually influence one another. While the investment club movement was in part a response to economic domination by corporate and political elites, it also catalyzed genuine shifts in the power dynamics between individuals and corporations.

This paper discusses the relationship between fraud and financial crises. Fraud is envisioned historically as a violation of trust, and the classic triangle of smuggling, contraband and enforcement sheds light on developments in the financial sphere. Schematically, fraud emerges with economic prosperity, grows in a financial crisis when prices fall, and culminates in crash and panic when the scandal is revealed. Kindleberger points out that the propensity to defraud increases with the speculation that accompanies a boom. Fraud is recognised as a coincident indicator of prosperity. The paper considers the implicit consensus view that fraud and the cycle are linked, with long cycles including alternating phases of liberalisation/globalisation and contraction. If fraud is part of the cost of learning to deal with new fields and new frontiers in the appetite for risk, then fraud and crisis will inevitably find a fertile breeding ground in globalisation. Topics discussed include the distortion of decision‐making, the structure of incentives, information and regulatory implications.

Offering an empirical study of the rush to promote a new technology of its time, which is a significant phenomenon in its own right, the paper's purpose is to offer a reminder that new technologies often generate speculative and unstable business conditions.

The paper uses Henry English's A Complete View of the Joint Stock Companies Formed during the Years 1824 and 1825 to identify companies (n=70), and follows up cases with record and archive study.

The development of steamship services was an important push of transportation and communication technology. The establishment of steam shipping services in coastal waters and near country trade is an analogy of later technologies such as the telegraph, telephone and latterly computer‐mediated digital communication over the internet with global reach. Unlike the canal and railway manias the outcome was minimal.

As in the Dotcom boom of the early 2000s the study highlights the dangers of speculative business ventures (over‐ambitious promotion and fraud) which lacked a strong link to markets, the pull of significant demand and were weak in terms of business acumen and organization.

As a piece of original business historical research it is not only the findings which are of value, but the paper represents an exemplar of the continued use of archival and record material and information resources to support scholarly activity. Historians of today who wish to study the emerging digital economy may yet encounter problems in an ability to draw on bodies of contemporary evidence. The current issues of digital archiving and digital curation are only just beginning to be appreciated.

Beijing and Shanghai have been the leading housing markets in urban China. In the late half of the 2000s, both metropolises experienced a pronounced process of housing price appreciation. The purpose of this paper is to examine whether there exist housing price bubbles in the two largest cities in China.

The study is based on a combination of different quantitative indicators: a comparison of housing market prices with the rational expectation price, mortgage loans, and the ratios of price to income and to rent. Moreover, the statistical tool of control chart is introduced to quantify housing bubbles.

The study shows that Beijing appears to have been on the way of forming a housing price bubble between 2005 and 2008, and that there perhaps existed a housing bubble in Shanghai from 2003 to 2004. It appears that the housing market cycle in Beijing may be divided into three stages: the cycle peak stage (1991‐1997), the cycle trough stage (1998‐2003) and the second cycle peak stage (2004‐2008).

In an attempt to explain the possible existence of housing bubbles in Beijing and Shanghai, this paper uses an integrated strategy involved with such fundamentals as interest rates, rent, income and GDP. In particular, the control chart, based on per capita GDP, is introduced to identify a housing bubble.