Asset Price Misalignments and the Role of Money and Credit*

This paper contributes to the analysis on the properties of money and credit indicators for detecting asset price misalignments. After a literature review, the paper discusses several approaches useful for detecting asset price busts. Considering a sample of 17 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development industrialized countries and the euro area over the period 1969 Q1–2008 Q3, an asset price composite indicator incorporating developments in both stock and house price markets is constructed and a criterion to identify the periods characterized by asset price busts is proposed. The empirical analysis is based on a pooled probit‐type approach with several monetary, financial and real variables. According to statistical tests, credit aggregates (either in terms of annual changes or growth gap), changes in nominal long‐term interest rates and investment‐to‐GDP ratios jointly with either house or stock price dynamics turn out to be the best indicators helping to forecast asset price busts up to eight quarters in advance. Some robustness checks indicate that both the method used to identify asset price busts and the choice of the binary variable are reliable.