Herding behavior in cryptocurrency markets

Abstract

There are no solid arguments to sustain that digital currencies are the future of online payments or the disruptive technology that some of its former participants declared when used to face critiques. This paper aims to solve the cryptocurrency puzzle from a behavioral finance perspective by finding the parallelism between biases present in financial markets that could be applied to cryptomarkets. Moreover, it is suggested that cryptocurrencies' prices are driven by herding, hence this study test herding behavior under asymmetric and symmetric conditions and the existence of different herding regimes by employing the Markov-Switching approach.