This paper demonstrates that an asset pricing model with least-squares learning can lead to bubbles and crashes as endogenous responses to the fundamentals driving asset prices. When agents are risk-averse they need to make forecasts of the conditional variance of a stock¡¯s return....

In an asset-pricing model, risk-averse agents need to forecast the conditional variance of a stock's return. A near-rational restricted perceptions equilibrium exists in which agents believe prices follow a random walk with a conditional variance that is self-fulfilling. When agents estimate...