The creation of Bitcoin heralded the arrival of digital or crypto-currency and has been regarded as a phenomenon. Since its introduction, it has experienced a meteoric rise in price and rapid growth accompanied by huge volatility swings, and also attracted plenty of controversies which even involved law enforcement agencies. Hence, claims abound that bitcoin has been characterised by bubbles ready to burst any time (e.g. the recent collapse of Bitcoin's biggest exchange, Mt Gox). This has earned plenty of coverage in the media but surprisingly not in the academic literature. We therefore fill this knowledge gap. We conduct an econometric investigation of the existence of bubbles in the bitcoin market based on a recently developed technique that is robust in detecting bubbles -that of Phillips, Shi and Yu (2013a). Over the period 2010-2014, we detected a number of short-lived bubbles; most importantly, we found three huge bubbles in the latter part of the period 2011-2013 lasting from 66 days to 106 days, with the last and biggest one being the one that 'broke the camel's back" -the demise of the Mt Gox exchange.

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This paper investigates the price linkages between the equity market of Australia and that of the US, UK, Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, and Korea using weekly MSCI stock market data covering the period 1974-1995. Cointegration test using the Johansen (Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, 12, 1988) and Johansen and Juselius (Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, 52, 1990) procedure and Granger-causality tests based on error-correction models and standard vector autoregression models are conducted. No cointegration was found between Australia and the other markets. However, the Granger-causality and forecast variance decomposition analyses reveal that Australia is significantly linked with the US and the UK. The impulse response analyses further show that Australia responds to shocks from the US and the UK immediately during the first week and this response is completed with a period of four weeks.

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