ASSESSING PRE-CRISIS FUNDAMENTALS IN SELECTED ASIAN STOCK MARKETS.

In the folklore of emerging markets, there is a popular belief that bubbles are inevitable. In this paper, our objective is to estimate a state-space model for rational bubbles in selected Asian economies with the aid of the Kalman Filter. For each economy, we derive a possible picture of the bubble formation process that is implied by the state-space formulation. The estimation is based on the rational valuation formula for stock prices. Our results provide a possible way of defining the presence of rational bubbles in the stock markets of Taiwan, Singapore, Korea, and Malaysia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]