Speculative Fever: Investor Contagion in the Housing Bubble
研究美国住房市场繁荣与萧条中，新手投资者因观察到邻里多种投资活动而进入市场，且这些被传染的投资者表现较差。
Historical anecdotes abound of new investors being drawn into a booming asset market, only to suffer when the market turns. While the role of investor contagion in asset bubbles has been explored extensively in the theoretical literature, causal empirical evidence on the topic is much rarer. This paper studies the recent boom and bust in the US housing market and establishes that many novice investors entered the market as a direct result of observing investing activity of multiple forms in their own neighborhoods and that “infected” investors performed poorly relative to other investors along several dimensions.