Since Flood and Garber (1980), the debate surrounding speculative bubbles has never subsided. A key obstacle to resolve this issue is the identification problem. A bubble is usually inferred from some assumed fundamental determinants of a price. These assumptions could be over-simplified. Furthermore, there might be data measurement errors. In this paper, we attempt to capture such errors with a latent state variable. This variable is extracted with Kalman filter. Based on our empirical comparisons, we find that it is possible to attribute the observed large price swings in the property market of Hong Kong during the 1980s and 1990s to a periodically collapsing rational speculative bubble.JEL classification: G12, C12, C13, C52

Previous papers on Singapore manufacturing productivity have focused almost exclusively on total factor productivity (TFP) growth rates and ignored the problem of measuring the extent of learningby-doing. In this paper, we examine an alternative measure: the rate of technical efficiency change. Using data from 1974-1998, a translog production frontier is estimated. Following a conceptual framework popularised by Bauer (1990), productivity growth is decomposed into components arising from technical progress, technical efficiency change, a scale economies effect and an allocative inefficiency effect.

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We study the effects of free trade areas on bilateral trade flows. We review and extend the previous empirical literature by embarking on the modelling of unobserved heterogeneity. We apply our preferred model to the case of the Asean Free Trade Area (AFTA). The estimation results suggest that there has been a positive effect of AFTA. This empirical finding is contrary to earlier estimation results, which are typically not so positive about AFTA. It is our impression that these earlier estimates on AFTA are confounded with the effects of unobserved determinants of trade.

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.