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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.

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 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.

The purpose of this paper is to clarify the concept of bubble, what it means to explain a bubble and propose a list of bubble indicators.

The paper is based on a literature review and some philosophical ideas to derive conclusions for the problems studied.

A price bubble should be defined only in relation to the development of prices: a dramatic increase immediately followed by a dramatic fall. The traditional definition in terms of prices not determined by fundamentals is problematic primarily because the concept “fundamentals” is vague. A bubble can never be explained by a single factor, but is the result of the interaction of a number of factors. The explanatory factors proposed are used to derive a set of indicators working as warning signals whether a dramatic increase in prices will be followed by a dramatic fall. The list developed covers, for example, interest costs in relation to household incomes, the elasticity of supply, price expectations and credit conditions.

Both the explanatory framework and the list of indicators should be seen as preliminary and the starting point for further development through empirical testing.

A developed list of bubble indicators could be useful for a number of actors, e.g. banks and authorities responsible for monitoring financial stability.

The contribution is a clearer and more useful concept of bubble, a clearer separation of the question whether bubbles exist and how they should be explained. The proposed list of indicators goes far beyond earlier indicators.

Traces the evolution of the corporation in England, from Greco‐Roman times to the Joint Companies Act of 1862. The evolution suggests a supply of the corporate form that responded to the demands of the marketplace. With the growing specialization of labour in the markets, the corporate form came to be more specialized itself, ending with the enactment of universally available limited liability incorporation.

The purpose of this paper is to advance a research agenda on the topic of problematising profit and profitability. This paper also acts as an introduction to this Accounting, Auditing & Accountability (AAAJ) special section which aims to foster the development of literature focussing on critically evaluating issues surrounding profit and profitability and their sometimes, deleterious effects on society. The authors encourage an interdisciplinary discussion on the concepts of profit and profitability and various ways in which the authors could potentially problematise these concepts.

The authors undertake a purposive interdisciplinary review to provide context on problematising profit and profitability by briefly discussing the evolution of the concept of profit and by reviewing some contemporary debates and discussions about the role and status of profit and profitability.

In order to further develop the literature on problematising profit and profitability, it is important to broaden the analytical framework in order to (1) uncover the assumptions that make profitable activities possible as well as justifications of such activities; (2) analyse the practices of profit not only in the sense of computational practices but also in the sense of strategic and rhetorical calculations; (3) evaluate the practices of profit and profitability where they are situated within social and power relationships and (4) connect practices of profit to specific social imaginaries of profit.

In setting out a future research agenda, this paper fosters theoretical and methodological pluralism and encourages box-breaking research in the research community focussing on problematising profit and profitability in various settings. The perspectives offered in this paper provides not only a basis for further research in this critical area of discourse and regulation on the role and status of profit and profitability but also provides emancipatory potential for practitioners (to be reflective of their practices and their undesired consequences of such practices) whose overarching focus is on these accounting numbers.

In speeches and testimonies, Alan Greenspan claimed intellectual links between his financial policies and the ideas of Milton Friedman and Joseph A. Schumpeter on banks, central banks, and financial crises. As the financial crisis deepened in 2008, Greenspan admitted that his policies had been shockingly wrong. The purpose of this paper is to explain why his claims of intellectual links between those policies and the ideas of Friedman and Schumpeter were also wrong.

Beginning with representative examples of Greenspan's citations of Friedman and of Schumpeter as supporting his financial policies, the authors review the economic ideas of Friedman and Schumpeter on banks, central banks, and financial crises. In each case, we contrast Greenspan's financial policies with those ideas, demonstrating the spurious nature of his claims of intellectual links.

While expanding the role of the Federal Reserve in the financial markets, Greenspan's financial policies were based on the declaration that deregulation and financial innovations were providing flexibility and stability for the entire financial system. In his financial policies, Greenspan rejected Friedman's recommendations for changes in the powers and functioning of the Federal Reserve that featured a monetary policy rule and the 100 percent reserve requirement for deposits that would involve the separation of depository banking from loans and investments. From a Schumpeterian perspective, Greenspan's policies encouraged and facilitated the massive “reckless” finance that was responsible for the financial crisis of 2007‐2009.

Greenspan's legacy as Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board is one of policies that first contributed to recurring financial crises of increasing severity and were then followed by an extraordinary policy expansion of the Federal Reserve in attempts to cope with the crises. On that basis, it is important to have a clear understanding of the lack of intellectual support for those policies from the influential economists with whom he claimed intellectual links.