Housing wealth is a large component of total wealth and plays an important role in aggregate business cycles. In this paper, we explore data on real house price cycles at the aggregate level and city level for the United States and Canada. Using a panel of 137 cities, we examine the duration,...

Aggregate economic activity was heavily influenced by the construction sector's expansion, collapse, and failure to revive during the interwar years. The 1920s building boom was the first to respond to the potential of the automobile and the last to be largely unplanned. Its uncoordinated...

In the 1929-1933 downturn of the Great Depression, house values and homeownership rates fell more, and mortgage foreclosure rates were higher, in cities that had experienced relatively high rates of house construction in the residential real-estate boom of the mid-1920s. Across the 1920s, boom...