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We examine the characteristics and comovement of cycles in house prices, credit, real activity and interest rates in advanced economies during the past 25 years, using a dynamic generalized factor model. House price cycles generally lead credit and business cycles over the long term, while in the short to medium term the relationship varies across countries. Interest rates tend to lag other cycles at all time horizons. While global factors are important, the U.S. business cycle, house price cycle and interest rate cycle generally lead the respective cycles in other countries over all time hori

This note outlines and discusses some of the strands in the post-Keynesian literature on business cycles. Most post-Keynesians have focused on endogenously generated cycles, but the mechanism varies: some focus on the goods market, others on financial markets, the labor market, or political intervention. The merits of formal modeling of the cycles have also come in for debate.

Many historical processes exhibit recurrent patterns of change. Century-long periods of population expansion come before long periods of stagnation and decline; the dynamics of prices mirror population oscillations; and states go through strong expansionist phases followed by periods of state failure, endemic sociopolitical instability, and territorial loss. Peter Turchin and Sergey Nefedov explore the dynamics and causal connections between such demographic, economic, and political variables in agrarian societies and offer detailed explanations for these long-term oscillations.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to review what is known about property cycles following the financial crisis of 2008.Design/methodology/approachThe method is to review the literature on property cycles published since the 1930s, to examine the extent to which endogenous causes have been identified as distinct from exogenous factors that may have produced cyclicality resulting from weak adjustment mechanisms but not cycles.FindingsWhilst there is broad consensus that the property market has delays in adjustment which produce oscillations resulting from external shocks, it is more difficult to identify endogenous causes of cycles, though there are some possible candidates, notably technical progress.Practical implicationsThe slump after 2008 has cost savers and taxpayers dear, so better means of predicting cycles so that policy makers can mitigate them is desirable.Originality/valueThe debate about whether property cycles result from exogenous shocks or endogenous causes is in danger of being lost sight of. If the former, then the property industry is a channel through which external factors feed through to the economy, albeit magnified by weak adjustment factors. If there are endogenous causes, then policy makers would be unwise to overlook their potential destabilising impact on the economy.

Organizations face a key challenge in dynamic environments: the contexts in which experience is gained will not always match the contexts in which experience will be applied. This challenge has been investigated largely in terms of progressive environmental change, which increasingly invalidates learning from prior experience. A great deal of environmental dynamism, however, involves cycling through a limited set of environmental conditions that appear and then give way to other conditions, only to later reappear. We argue that cycles create some of the same problems for organizations as progressive change but also provide organizations an opportunity to reapply lessons as the cycle moves from phase to phase. We develop hypotheses about how cycles affect what organizations learn and how cyclical conditions affect how organizations learn. We test the resulting hypotheses in the highly cyclical context of construction lending by community banks using a panel of nearly 40 years of local real estate cycles. The online appendices are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2018.1239 .

A model of elections is put forth in which there are two parties, each representing a different constituency of voters (the poor and the rich). The political issue is the choice of a proportional tax rate on income, revenues from which are used to finance a public good. There is a stochastic element in which party wins the elections, due to party uncertainty concerning voter preferences, or due to uncertainty concerning which voters will show up at the polls. A political equilibrium in one period consists in a tax policy put forth by each party, and a probability that each party wins. A long series of elections is simulated (100 periods). Voter preferences for the public good change adversely as a function of length of time the incumbent party has been in power and the level of the public good in the last period. Thus, if the party in power funds high levels of the public good, preferences start to move against the public good. This model generates dramatic political cycles, and it is argued that these cycles are of fundamentally different origin from that discussed in the realignment literature.

Why do we experience business cycles? What creates them? Is it mass psychology, or phenomena in the management of business? Are the banks to blame or should we be looking to the unions and the politicians? Lars Tvede's story moves back in time to the Scottish gambler and financial genius, John Law, and then on to the distracted Adam Smith, the stockbroker Ricardo, the investment banker Thornton, the extrovert Schumpeter, the speculator Jay Gould and many others. The computer jugglers of the modern day, with giant networks of equations, try to solve the same questions that have attracted the at