NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - If baby boomers drive up the value of assets like houses and stocks because of their buying behavior, wouldn't the opposite hold as well? And, if so, doesn't that mean the stock market is likely to drop when baby boomers start to retire in a few years and begin drawing money from their retirement accounts?

-- Tony Armino, Carlsbad, Calif.

I call it the "blame it on the boomers" theory. After all, the stock market soared during the boomers' peak earning years in the 1990s, so it only makes sense that with the boomers pulling money out of stocks, the market will tank, right?

This notion has been around for quite a few years. Indeed, several academics have created models of stock prices that support the idea.

But while such a scenario seems to make sense in theory, things might not be so neat and clean in reality.

In fact, MIT economist James Poterba recently pooh-poohed likelihood of a boomer-instigated crash in a paper he presented when economists, policy makers and a number of central bankers from around the world, including our own Fed Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, met in Jackson Hole, Wyoming at the end of August.

Essentially, Poterba relied on two main arguments.

First, Poterba pointed out that "the correlation between asset returns on stocks, bonds or bills and the age structure of the U.S. population over the past seventy years is weak." In fact, he found that correlation to be statistically significant in the case of Treasury bills, not stocks or other bonds.

Poterba also went on to point out that "financial assets decline only gradually when households are in their retirement years."

That makes sense when you consider that wealthy households far and away own most of the stock in the United States and that many of these households won't exactly be forced to quickly sell huge portions of their holdings to support themselves. Indeed, many of the wealthy will likely pass along a good portion of their holdings to their lucky heirs.

I've totally oversimplified Poterba's thesis. (If you want the gory details, you can read the paper by clicking here.)

But its main thrust makes sense to me. Somehow, the idea that asset values, which depend on a subtle interplay of supply and demand for different types of investments not just within the United States but around the world and are also influenced by economic growth and corporate productivity, are going to be overwhelmingly influenced by one single factor -- the behavior of the boomers -- never made sense to me.

The whole theory seems like half-baked notion the self-absorbed boomers would come up with to convince the world of their importance.

Clearly, there are plenty of risks to take into account when investing in stocks. I just wouldn't put the retirement of the boomers very high up on the list.

Walter Updegrave is a senior editor at MONEY Magazine and is the author of "We're Not in Kansas Anymore: Strategies for Retiring Rich in a Totally Changed World."