In 2003, he co-authored a Brookings Institution paper called "Is There a Bubble in the Housing Market?", and in 2005 he warned that "further rises in the [stock and housing] markets could lead, eventually, to even more significant declines... A long-run consequence could be a decline in consumer and business confidence, and another, possibly worldwide, recession." Writing in The Wall Street Journal in August 2006, Shiller again warned that "there is significant risk of a ... possible recession sooner than most of us expected.", and in September 2007, almost exactly one year before the collapse of Lehman Brothers, Shiller wrote an article in which he predicted an imminent collapse in the U.S.housing market, and subsequent financial panic.
Shiller was born in Detroit, Michigan, the son of Ruth R. (née Radsville) and Benjamin Peter Shiller, an engineer-cum-entrepreneur.[12] He is of Lithuanian descent.[13] He is married to Virginia Marie (Faulstich), a psychologist, and has two children.[12] He was raised as a Methodist.[14]
In 1981 Shiller published an article in which he challenged the efficient-market hypothesis, which was the dominant view in the economics profession at the time.[16] Shiller argued that in a rational stock market, investors would base stock prices on the expected receipt of future dividends, discounted to a present value. He examined the performance of the U.S.stock market since the 1920s, and considered the kinds of expectations of future dividends and discount rates that could justify the wide range of variation experienced in the stock market. Shiller concluded that the volatility of the stock market was greater than could plausibly be explained by any rational view of the future. This article was later named as one of the "top 20" articles in the 100-year history of the American Economic Association.
The behavioral finance school gained new credibility following the October 1987 stock market crash. Shiller's work included survey research that asked investors and stock traders what motivated them to make trades; the results further bolstered his hypothesis that these decisions are often driven by emotion instead of rational calculation. Much of this survey data has been gathered continuously since 1989.[17]
Robert Shiller's plot of the S&P Composite Real Price Index, Earnings, Dividends, and Interest Rates, from Irrational Exuberance, 2d ed. In the preface to this edition, Shiller warns that "[t]he stock market has not come down to historical levels: the price-earnings ratio as I define it in this book is still, at this writing [2005], in the mid‑20s, far higher than the historical average. ... People still place too much confidence in the markets and have too strong a belief that paying attention to the gyrations in their investments will someday make them rich, and so they do not make conservative preparations for possible bad outcomes."Price-earnings ratios as a predictor of twenty-year returns based on the plot by Robert Shiller (Figure 10.1, ). The horizontal axis shows the real price-earnings ratio of the S&P Composite Stock Price Index as computed in Irrational Exuberance (inflation adjusted price divided by the prior ten-year mean of inflation-adjusted earnings). The vertical axis shows the geometric average real annual return on investing in the S&P Composite Stock Price Index, reinvesting dividends, and selling twenty years later. Data from different twenty-year periods is color-coded as shown in the key. See also ten-year returns. Shiller states that this plot "confirms that long-term investors – investors who commit their money to an investment for ten full years – did do well when prices were low relative to earnings at the beginning of the ten years. Long-term investors would be well advised, individually, to lower their exposure to the stock market when it is high, as it has been recently, and get into the market when it is low."
In 1991 he formed Case Shiller Weiss with economists Karl Case and Allan Weiss who served as the CEO from inception to the sale to Fiserv.[20] The company produced a repeat-sales index using home sales prices data from across the nation, studying home pricing trends. The index was developed by Shiller and Case when Case was studying unsustainable house pricing booms in Boston and Shiller was studying the behavioral aspects of economic bubbles.[20] The repeat-sales index developed by Case and Shiller was later acquired and further developed by Fiserv and Standard & Poor, creating the Case-Shiller index.[20]
His book Irrational Exuberance (2000) – a New York Times bestseller – warned that the stock market had become a bubble in March 2000 (the very height of the market top), which could lead to a sharp decline.
On CNBC's "How to Profit from the Real Estate Boom" in 2005, he noted that housing price rises could not outstrip inflation in the long term because, except for land restricted sites, house prices would tend toward building costs plus normal economic profit. Co‑panelist David Lereah disagreed. In February, Lereah had put out his book Are You Missing the Real Estate Boom? signaling the market top for housing prices. While Shiller repeated his precise timing again for another market bubble, because the general level of nationwide residential real estate prices do not reveal themselves until after a lag of about one year, people did not believe Shiller had called another top until late 2006 and early 2007.
That same year, he co-authored a Brookings Institution paper entitled "Is There a Bubble in the Housing Market?". Shiller subsequently refined his position in the 2nd edition of Irrational Exuberance (2005), acknowledging that "further rises in the [stock and housing] markets could lead, eventually, to even more significant declines... A long-run consequence could be a decline in consumer and business confidence, and another, possibly worldwide, recession. This extreme outcome ... is not inevitable, but it is a much more serious risk than is widely acknowledged." Writing in The Wall Street Journal in August 2006, Shiller again warned that "there is significant risk of a very bad period, with slow sales, slim commissions, falling prices, rising default and foreclosures, serious trouble in financial markets, and a possible recession sooner than most of us expected."[22] In September 2007, almost exactly one year before the collapse of Lehman Brothers, Shiller wrote an article in which he predicted an imminent collapse in the U.S.housing market, and subsequent financial panic.[23]
Shiller was awarded the Deutsche Bank Prize in Financial Economics in 2009 for his pioneering research in the field of financial economics, relating to the dynamics of asset prices, such as fixed income, equities, and real estate, and their metrics. His work has been influential in the development of the theory as well as its implications for practice and policy making. His contributions on risk sharing, financial market volatility, bubbles and crises, have received widespread attention among academics, practitioners, and policymakers alike.[24] In 2010, he was named by Foreign Policy magazine to its list of top global thinkers.[25]
In 2010 Shiller supported the idea that to fix the financial and banking systems, in order to avoid future financial crisis, banks need to issue a new kind of debt, known as contingent capital, that automatically converts into equity if the regulators determine that there is a systemic national financial crisis, and if the bank is simultaneously in violation of capital-adequacy.[26]
His lecture at the prize ceremony explained why markets are not efficient. He presented an argument on why Eugene Fama's Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH) was fallacious. EMH postulates that the present value of an asset reflects the efficient incorporation of information into prices. According to Shiller, the results of the movement of the market are extremely erratic, unlike Fama's assertion where the movement would be smoother if it would reflect the intrinsic value of the assets. The results of the graphs provided by Shiller showed a clear aberration from that of the Efficient Market Hypothesis. For example, the dividend growth had been 2% per year on stocks. However, it contradicted the EMH since the growth did not reflect the expected dividends. It is further explained by Shiller's Linearized Present Value model, which is a result of collaboration with his colleague and former student John Campbell, that only one-half to one-third of the fluctuations in the stock market are explained by the expected dividends model. Also, in the lecture, Shiller pointed out that variables such as interest rates and building costs did not explain the movement of the housing market.
On the other hand, Shiller believes that more information regarding the asset market is crucial for its efficiency. Additionally, he alluded to John Maynard Keynes's explanation of stock markets to point out the irrationality of people while making decisions. Keynes compared the stock market to a beauty contest where people instead of betting on who they find attractive, bet on the contestant who the majority of people find attractive. Therefore, he believes that people do not use complicated mathematical calculations and a sophisticated economic model while participating in the asset market. He argued that a huge set of data is required for the market to operate efficiently. Since there were very minuscule data available on the asset markets for his research, let alone for the common people, he developed the Case-Shiller index that provides information about the trends in home prices. Thus, he added that the use of modern technology can benefit economists to accrue data of broader asset classes that will make the market more information-based and the prices more efficient.
In interviews in June 2015, Shiller warned of the potential of a stock market crash.[30] In August 2015, after a flash crash in individual stocks, he continued to see bubbly conditions in stocks, bonds and housing.[31]
In 2017, Shiller was quoted as calling Bitcoin the biggest financial bubble at the time.[33] The perceived failure of the Cincinnati Time Store has been used as an analogy to suggest that cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin are a "speculative bubble" waiting to burst, according to economist Robert J. Shiller.[34]
In 2019, Shiller published Narrative Economics. The book received favourable reviews and was selected among the Best books of 2019 list published by the Financial Times.[35]
Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events, Robert J. Shiller, Princeton University Press (2019), ISBN978-0691182292.
Phishing for Phools: The Economics of Manipulation and Deception, George A. Akerlof and Robert J. Shiller, Princeton University Press (2015), ISBN978-0-691-16831-9.
Finance and the Good Society, Robert J. Shiller, Princeton University Press (2012), ISBN0-691-15488-0.
The Subprime Solution: How Today's Global Financial Crisis Happened, and What to Do about It, Robert J. Shiller, Princeton University Press (2008), ISBN0-691-13929-6.
The New Financial Order: Risk in the 21st Century, Robert J. Shiller, Princeton University Press (2003), ISBN0-691-09172-2.
Macro Markets: Creating Institutions for Managing Society's largest Economic Risks, Robert J. Shiller, Clarendon Press, New York: Oxford University Press (1993), ISBN0-19-828782-8.
Market Volatility, Robert J. Shiller, MIT Press (1990), ISBN0-262-19290-X.
Op-eds
Shiller has written op-eds since at least 2007 for such publications as The New York Times, where he has appeared in print on at least two dozen occasions.
A stock market bubble is a type of economic bubble taking place in stock markets when market participants drive stock prices above their value in relation to some system of stock valuation.
Financial economics is the branch of economics characterized by a "concentration on monetary activities", in which "money of one type or another is likely to appear on both sides of a trade". Its concern is thus the interrelation of financial variables, such as share prices, interest rates and exchange rates, as opposed to those concerning the real economy. It has two main areas of focus: asset pricing and corporate finance; the first being the perspective of providers of capital, i.e. investors, and the second of users of capital. It thus provides the theoretical underpinning for much of finance.
An economic bubble is a period when current asset prices greatly exceed their intrinsic valuation, being the valuation that the underlying long-term fundamentals justify. Bubbles can be caused by overly optimistic projections about the scale and sustainability of growth, and/or by the belief that intrinsic valuation is no longer relevant when making an investment. They have appeared in most asset classes, including equities, commodities, real estate, and even esoteric assets. Bubbles usually form as a result of either excess liquidity in markets, and/or changed investor psychology. Large multi-asset bubbles, are attributed to central banking liquidity.
The efficient-market hypothesis (EMH) is a hypothesis in financial economics that states that asset prices reflect all available information. A direct implication is that it is impossible to "beat the market" consistently on a risk-adjusted basis since market prices should only react to new information.
Eugene Francis "Gene" Fama is an American economist, best known for his empirical work on portfolio theory, asset pricing, and the efficient-market hypothesis.
Richard H. Thaler is an American economist and the Charles R. Walgreen Distinguished Service Professor of Behavioral Science and Economics at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. In 2015, Thaler was president of the American Economic Association.
Irrational Exuberance is a book by American economist Robert J. Shiller of Yale University, published March 2000. The book examines economic bubbles in the 1990s and early 2000s, and is named after Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan's famed 1996 comment about "irrational exuberance" warning of such a possible bubble.
"Irrational exuberance" is the phrase used by the then-Federal Reserve Board chairman, Alan Greenspan, in a speech given at the American Enterprise Institute during the dot-com bubble of the 1990s. The phrase was interpreted as a warning that the stock market might be overvalued.
The 2000s United States housing bubble or house price boom or 2000shousing cycle was a sharp run up and subsequent collapse of house asset prices affecting over half of the U.S. states. In many regions a real estate bubble, it was the impetus for the subprime mortgage crisis. Housing prices peaked in early 2006, started to decline in 2006 and 2007, and reached new lows in 2011. On December 30, 2008, the Case–Shiller home price index reported the largest price drop in its history. The credit crisis resulting from the bursting of the housing bubble is an important cause of the Great Recession in the United States.
A housing bubble is one of several types of asset price bubbles which periodically occur in the market. The basic concept of a housing bubble is the same as for other asset bubbles, consisting of two main phases. First there is a period where house prices increase dramatically, driven more and more by speculation. In the second phase, house prices fall dramatically. Housing bubbles tend to be among the asset bubbles with the largest effect on the real economy because they are credit-fueled,,and a large number of households participate and not just investors, and because the wealth effect from housing tends to be larger than for other types of financial assets.
A real-estate bubble or property bubble is a type of economic bubble that occurs periodically in local or global real estate markets, and it typically follows a land boom. A land boom is a rapid increase in the market price of real property such as housing until they reach unsustainable levels and then declines. This period, during the run-up to the crash, is also known as froth. The questions of whether real estate bubbles can be identified and prevented, and whether they have broader macroeconomic significance, are answered differently by schools of economic thought, as detailed below.
Sanford "Sandy" Jay Grossman is an American economist and hedge fund manager specializing in quantitative finance. Grossman’s research has spanned the analysis of information in securities markets, corporate structure, property rights, and optimal dynamic risk management. He has published widely in leading economic and business journals, including American Economic Review, Journal of Econometrics, Econometrica, and Journal of Finance. His research in macroeconomics, finance, and risk management has earned numerous awards. Grossman is currently Chairman and CEO of QFS Asset Management, an affiliate of which he founded in 1988. QFS Asset Management shut down its sole remaining hedge fund in January 2014.
United States housing prices experienced a major market correction after the housing bubble that peaked in early 2006. Prices of real estate then adjusted downwards in late 2006, causing a loss of market liquidity and subprime defaults.
John Young Campbell is a British-American economist who has served as the Morton L. and Carole S. Olshan Professor of Economics at Harvard University since 1994.
Quantitative behavioral finance is a new discipline that uses mathematical and statistical methodology to understand behavioral biases in conjunction with valuation.
The Standard & Poor's CoreLogic Case–Shiller Home Price Indices are repeat-sales house price indices for the United States. There are multiple Case–Shiller home price indices: A national home price index, a 20-city composite index, a 10-city composite index, and twenty individual metro area indices. These indices were first produced commercially by Case Shiller Weiss. They are now calculated and kept monthly by Standard & Poor's, with data calculated for January 1987 to present. The indices kept by Standard & Poor are normalized to a value of 100 in January 2000. They are based on original work by economists Karl Case and Robert Shiller, whose team calculated the home price index back to 1990. Case and Shiller's index is normalized to a value of 100 in 1990. The Case-Shiller index on Shiller's website is updated quarterly. The two datasets can greatly differ due to different reference points and calculations. For example, in the 4th quarter of 2013, the Standard and Poor 20 city index point was in the 160's, while the index point for 4th quarter on the Shiller data was in the 130's. Shiller claims in his book Irrational Exuberance that such a long series of home prices does not appear to have been published for any country.
The Deutsche Bank Prize in Financial Economics honors renowned researchers who have made influential contributions to the fields of finance and money and macroeconomics, and whose work has led to practical and policy-relevant results. It was awarded biannually from 2005 to 2015 by the Center for Financial Studies (CFS), in partnership with Goethe University Frankfurt, and is sponsored by Deutsche Bank Donation Fund. The award carried an endowment of €50,000, which was donated by the Stiftungsfonds Deutsche Bank im Stifterverband für die Deutsche Wissenschaft.
Markus Konrad Brunnermeier is an economist, who is the Edwards S. Sanford Professor of Economics at Princeton University.
The cyclically adjusted price-to-earnings ratio, commonly known as CAPE, Shiller P/E, or P/E 10 ratio, is a stock valuation measure usually applied to the US S&P 500 equity market. It is defined as price divided by the average of ten years of earnings, adjusted for inflation. As such, it is principally used to assess likely future returns from equities over timescales of 10 to 20 years, with higher than average CAPE values implying lower than average long-term annual average returns.
Jeremy James Siegel is an American economist who is the Russell E. Palmer Professor of Finance at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He appears regularly on networks including CNN, CNBC and NPR, and writes regular columns for Kiplinger's Personal Finance and Yahoo! Finance. Siegel's paradox is named after him.
↑ Van Sweden, James (October 22, 2013). "Alumnus Wins Nobel Prize". www.kzoo.edu. Kalamazoo College. Retrieved October 31, 2013.
↑ Shiller, Robert J. (1981). "Do Stock Prices Move Too Much to Be Justified by Subsequent Changes in Dividends?". American Economic Review. 71 (3): 421–436. JSTOR1802789.
↑ Bartenstein, Ben; Russo, Camila (May 21, 2018). "Yale's Shiller warns crypto may be another Cincinnati time store". San Francisco Chronicle. Bloomberg News. Retrieved November 28, 2018. ...Two years later, the Welsh textile manufacturer Robert Owen attempted to establish the National Equitable Labour Exchange in London based on 'time money.' Both experiments failed, and a century later, economist John Pease Norton's proposal of an 'electric dollar' devolved into comedic fodder rather than a monetary innovation.
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![Robert Shiller's plot of the S&P Composite Real Price Index, Earnings, Dividends, and Interest Rates, from Irrational Exuberance, 2d ed. In the preface to this edition, Shiller warns that "[t]he stock market has not come down to historical levels: the price-earnings ratio as I define it in this book is still, at this writing [2005], in the mid-20s, far higher than the historical average. ... People still place too much confidence in the markets and have too strong a belief that paying attention to the gyrations in their investments will someday make them rich, and so they do not make conservative preparations for possible bad outcomes." IE Real SandP Prices, Earnings, and Dividends 1871-2006.png](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/6f/IE_Real_SandP_Prices%2C_Earnings%2C_and_Dividends_1871-2006.png/400px-IE_Real_SandP_Prices%2C_Earnings%2C_and_Dividends_1871-2006.png)
