IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/chf/rpseri/rp2320.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

NFT Bubbles

Author

Listed:
  • Andrea Barbon

    (University of St. Gallen; Swiss Finance Institute)

  • Angelo Ranaldo

    (University of St. Gallen; Swiss Finance Institute)

Abstract

By investigating nonfungible tokens (NFTs), we provide the first systematic study of retail investor behavior through asset bubbles. Given that NFTs are recorded in public blockchains, we are able to track investor behavior over time, leading to the identification of numerous price run-ups and crashes. Our study reveals that agent-level variables, such as investor sophistication, heterogeneity, and wash trading, in addition to aggregate variables, such as volatility, price acceleration, and turnover, significantly predict bubble formation and price crashes. We find that sophisticated investors consistently outperform others and exhibit characteristics consistent with superior information and skills, supporting the narrative surrounding asset pricing bubbles.

Suggested Citation

  • Andrea Barbon & Angelo Ranaldo, 2023. "NFT Bubbles," Swiss Finance Institute Research Paper Series 23-20, Swiss Finance Institute.
    • Handle: RePEc:chf:rpseri:rp2320
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4384395
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Greenwood, Robin & Thesmar, David, 2011. "Stock price fragility," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 102(3), pages 471-490.
    2. Harrison Hong & Jeremy C. Stein, 2007. "Disagreement and the Stock Market," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 21(2), pages 109-128, Spring.
    3. Jose A. Scheinkman & Wei Xiong, 2003. "Overconfidence and Speculative Bubbles," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 111(6), pages 1183-1219, December.
    4. Harrison Hong & Jeremy C. Stein, 1999. "A Unified Theory of Underreaction, Momentum Trading, and Overreaction in Asset Markets," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 54(6), pages 2143-2184, December.
    5. Luboš Pástor & Pietro Veronesi, 2009. "Technological Revolutions and Stock Prices," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 99(4), pages 1451-1483, September.
    6. Yousaf, Imran & Yarovaya, Larisa, 2022. "The relationship between trading volume, volatility and returns of Non-Fungible Tokens: evidence from a quantile approach," Finance Research Letters, Elsevier, vol. 50(C).
    7. Friedhelm Victor & Andrea Marie Weintraud, 2021. "Detecting and Quantifying Wash Trading on Decentralized Cryptocurrency Exchanges," Papers 2102.07001, arXiv.org.
    8. Shleifer, Andrei & Vishny, Robert W, 1997. "The Limits of Arbitrage," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 52(1), pages 35-55, March.
    9. Amihud, Yakov, 2002. "Illiquidity and stock returns: cross-section and time-series effects," Journal of Financial Markets, Elsevier, vol. 5(1), pages 31-56, January.
    10. Brice Corgnet & Roberto Hernán-González & Praveen Kujal & David Porter, 2015. "The Effect of Earned Versus House Money on Price Bubble Formation in Experimental Asset Markets," Review of Finance, European Finance Association, vol. 19(4), pages 1455-1488.
    11. Easley, David & O'Hara, Maureen, 1987. "Price, trade size, and information in securities markets," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 19(1), pages 69-90, September.
    12. Van Horne, James C, 1985. "Of Financial Innovations and Excesses," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 40(3), pages 621-631, July.
    13. Dowling, Michael, 2022. "Fertile LAND: Pricing non-fungible tokens," Finance Research Letters, Elsevier, vol. 44(C).
    14. Lennart Ante, 2022. "The Non-Fungible Token (NFT) Market and Its Relationship with Bitcoin and Ethereum," FinTech, MDPI, vol. 1(3), pages 1-9, June.
    15. Lin William Cong & Ye Li & Neng Wang, 2021. "Tokenomics: Dynamic Adoption and Valuation [The demand of liquid assets with uncertain lumpy expenditures]," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 34(3), pages 1105-1155.
    16. Eli Ofek & Matthew Richardson, 2003. "DotCom Mania: The Rise and Fall of Internet Stock Prices," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 58(3), pages 1113-1137, June.
    17. Greenwood, Robin & Nagel, Stefan, 2009. "Inexperienced investors and bubbles," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 93(2), pages 239-258, August.
    18. Allen F. & Morris S. & Postlewaite A., 1993. "Finite Bubbles with Short Sale Constraints and Asymmetric Information," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 61(2), pages 206-229, December.
    19. Dowling, Michael, 2022. "Is non-fungible token pricing driven by cryptocurrencies?," Finance Research Letters, Elsevier, vol. 44(C).
    20. Barberis, Nicholas & Greenwood, Robin & Jin, Lawrence & Shleifer, Andrei, 2018. "Extrapolation and bubbles," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 129(2), pages 203-227.
    21. Nneji, Ogonna, 2015. "Liquidity shocks and stock bubbles," Journal of International Financial Markets, Institutions and Money, Elsevier, vol. 35(C), pages 132-146.
    22. Julija Michailova & Ulrich Schmidt, 2016. "Overconfidence and Bubbles in Experimental Asset Markets," Journal of Behavioral Finance, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 17(3), pages 280-292, July.
    23. repec:bla:jfinan:v:58:y:2003:i:3:p:1113-1138 is not listed on IDEAS
    24. Smith, Vernon L & Suchanek, Gerry L & Williams, Arlington W, 1988. "Bubbles, Crashes, and Endogenous Expectations in Experimental Spot Asset Markets," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 56(5), pages 1119-1151, September.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Brunnermeier, Markus K. & Oehmke, Martin, 2013. "Bubbles, Financial Crises, and Systemic Risk," Handbook of the Economics of Finance, in: G.M. Constantinides & M. Harris & R. M. Stulz (ed.), Handbook of the Economics of Finance, volume 2, chapter 0, pages 1221-1288, Elsevier.
    2. Fotini Economou & Konstantinos Gavriilidis & Bartosz Gebka & Vasileios Kallinterakis, 2022. "Feedback trading: a review of theory and empirical evidence," Review of Behavioral Finance, Emerald Group Publishing Limited, vol. 15(4), pages 429-476, February.
    3. Greenwood, Robin & Shleifer, Andrei & You, Yang, 2019. "Bubbles for Fama," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 131(1), pages 20-43.
    4. Bordalo, Pedro & Gennaioli, Nicola & Kwon, Spencer Yongwook & Shleifer, Andrei, 2021. "Diagnostic bubbles," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 141(3), pages 1060-1077.
    5. Wei Xiong & Jialin Yu, 2011. "The Chinese Warrants Bubble," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 101(6), pages 2723-2753, October.
    6. ÅžimÅŸek, Alp, 2021. "The Macroeconomics of Financial Speculation," CEPR Discussion Papers 15733, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    7. Kedar-Levy, Haim, 2020. "Price discovery in the small and in the large: Momentum and reversal, bubbles, and crashes," Journal of Financial Markets, Elsevier, vol. 48(C).
    8. Hong, Harrison & Scheinkman, José & Xiong, Wei, 2008. "Advisors and asset prices: A model of the origins of bubbles," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 89(2), pages 268-287, August.
    9. Eom, Yunsung, 2021. "Kimchi premium and speculative trading in bitcoin," Finance Research Letters, Elsevier, vol. 38(C).
    10. Barberis, Nicholas & Greenwood, Robin & Jin, Lawrence & Shleifer, Andrei, 2018. "Extrapolation and bubbles," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 129(2), pages 203-227.
    11. Wei Xiong, 2013. "Bubbles, Crises, and Heterogeneous Beliefs," NBER Working Papers 18905, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    12. DeFusco, Anthony A. & Nathanson, Charles G. & Zwick, Eric, 2022. "Speculative dynamics of prices and volume," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 146(1), pages 205-229.
    13. Utz Weitzel & Christoph Huber & Jürgen Huber & Michael Kirchler & Florian Lindner & Julia Rose & Lauren Cohen, 2020. "Bubbles and Financial Professionals," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 33(6), pages 2659-2696.
    14. Julien Pénasse & Luc Renneboog, 2022. "Speculative Trading and Bubbles: Evidence from the Art Market," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 68(7), pages 4939-4963, July.
    15. Carlos J. Perez & Manuel Santos, 2017. "On the Dynamics of Speculation in a Model of Bubbles and Manias," Working Papers 2017-02, University of Miami, Department of Economics.
    16. Thorsten Lehnert, 2020. "Fear and stock price bubbles," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 15(5), pages 1-17, May.
    17. Michael Bailey & Ruiqing Cao & Theresa Kuchler & Johannes Stroebel, 2016. "Social Networks and Housing Markets," NBER Working Papers 22258, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    18. Liu, Clark & Wang, Shujing & Wei, K.C. John, 2021. "Demand shock, speculative beta, and asset prices: Evidence from the Shanghai-Hong Kong Stock Connect program," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 126(C).
    19. Kaizoji, Taisei (kaizoji@icu.ac.jp), 2010. "A Behavioral Model of Bubbles and Crashes," MPRA Paper 20352, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    20. Matteo Benetton & Giovanni Compiani, 2024. "Investors’ Beliefs and Cryptocurrency Prices," The Review of Asset Pricing Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 14(2), pages 197-236.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Financial Bubbles; Nonfungible Tokens; Agent-level; Blockchain;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • G14 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - Information and Market Efficiency; Event Studies; Insider Trading
    • G12 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - Asset Pricing; Trading Volume; Bond Interest Rates

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:chf:rpseri:rp2320. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Ridima Mittal (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/fameech.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.