The copper price is a leading indicator of real estate activity. Price increases are statistically related to increasing numbers of applications for residential building permits. However, this reciprocity is not instantaneous as permit numbers lag price rises by 9 to 10 months. This dynamic is...

I explore whether time-series methods exploiting the long-run equilibrium properties of the housing market might have detected the disequilibrium in U.S. house prices which pre-dated the Great Recession as it was building up. Based on real-time data, I show that a VAR in levels identified as in...