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This chapter describes empirical patterns in real house prices in the United States over the last three decades. It highlights six stylized facts. First, despite the sizable boom-bust pattern in house prices at the national level, individual housing markets in the United States experienced considerable heterogeneity in the amplitudes of their cycles. Second, the boom-bust of the 2000s bears remarkable similarities—as well as some differences—to the boom-bust of the 1980s. Third, housing markets also experienced differences in the timing of their cycles. Fourth, the largest booms and busts, and their timing, seem to be clustered geographically, with the largest amplitude cycles in the boom/bust of the 1990s and 2000s occurring in coastal metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) in Florida. Fifth, other interesting patterns emerge when one considers annual house price growth, rather than house price changes from trough to peak and back again. Lastly, these five patterns remain even when house prices are purged of demand fundamentals such as rents, incomes, or employment.

Once an exotic species has successfully established a self-sustaining population, it may spread beyond its initial point of introduction and establish meaningful interactions with species native to this location. This chapter reviews the relatively large literature on models of geographic range expansion (spread) in invasive species. In particular, it notes the tremendous bias towards a few, very successful and widespread exotic bird species, on our understanding of exotic species range expansion. For the same reasons that exotic birds have already contributed to understanding invasions (i.e., there is detailed information on their numbers and locations), it is argued that with the right research effort they can also help us gain a clear picture of why some exotic species do not expand their ranges once established, or only do so after a long lag period.

This chapter focuses on supply side developments in the housing market. It addresses four key issues. First, how much excess housing production occurred during the boom phase of the cycle and how far along is the correction? Second, it considers trends in the characteristics of new single-family homes built prior to, during, and after the construction boom to assess what effect, if any, the boom may have had on those trends. The third question is how the home-building industry changed as prices boomed during the 2000s. Finally, it addresses the question of whether these large developers reaped excess profits from the boom, or whether excess demand simply drove up land values in specific markets, enriching landowners.

Chapter 5 deals with the domestic and external causes of the debt crisis of the 1980s and the consequent “lost decade” of Latin American development. It then analyzes the shift toward and diversity of market reforms, including their recent rejection by some countries. The outcomes were a stronger integration into world trade and investment flows, as well as greater fiscal discipline and low inflation but, a few countries aside, slower economic and productivity growth and stronger business cycles. The steady rise in public social spending and expanded coverage of basic social services, which can be seen as “democratic dividends”, were accompanied by a deterioration in employment and income distribution from the 1980s to the early 2000s and a lost quarter century in poverty reduction, followed by a significant improvements in all of these variables during the economic boom that took place in the early XXI century.

This chapter investigates spatial variations in prices over the boom-bust cycle of housing markets both within and across urban areas. It considers the role of a new supply proxy—commuting time–in explaining the within-market and cross-market variation in how house price varies with stages of the market cycle. The within-market analysis used self-reported home values from the 2005 to 2010 ACS samples to examine the changing relationship between housing price growth and commuting time. Consistent with the notion that buildings are easier to build at the city edge, the study finds that the price gradient became flatter in the bust, implying prices fell more in the center than at the city's edge. The analysis of housing price growth across markets shows that when prices increase overall, prices rise more in metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) with greater average commuting time, even when controlling for regulatory and topological supply constraint proxies previously used in the literature.

This chapter investigates the external relationship between capital and labor that underlies the formation of the wage-price spiral. The resulting distributive cycle is a long-phased one. It is demonstrated that booms and busts of the distributive cycle and the pronounced reserve army mechanism underlying it can be moderated in amplitude if both labor and capital can reach an appropriate consensus with respect to maximum real wages in the prosperity phase and with respect to minimum real wages in the stagnant phase.

This chapter discusses the theory of geopolitics, beginning with an overview of some elementary facts from nonlinear dynamics. In particular, it describes boundless growth, examples of which are linear and exponential growth. It then considers the kinds of dynamics illustrated by the asymptotic and logistic models, in which the system is always attracted to a unique stable equilibrium, along with metastable dynamics, boom–bust dynamics, and sustained oscillations. It also examines three fundamental types of dynamics characterizing purely endogenous systems: zero-order dynamics, first-order dynamics, and second-order dynamics. The chapter goes on to analyze Randall Collins' theory of geopolitics, which postulates three main mechanisms explaining the territorial dynamics of states: geopolitical resources, logistical loads, and the marchland position. Finally, it reviews the simulation model of conflict legitimacy dynamics developed by Hanneman et al.

Fundamental gaps in EMU’s economic governance structure make it an incomplete common currency area (CCA). These gaps channeled the international financial crisis into a split between its core and peripheral sub-central political units (member states), inflicting enormous economic and social costs on the latter and retarding recovery elsewhere in Europe. The central level of a complete CCA, like the US, has the fiscal and financial regulatory as well as monetary capacities for governing the single economy into which the common currency integrates the sub-central units. All three capacities are essential to counteracting a market economy’s inherent instability. However, EMU’s central level is equipped only with monetary capacity, relegating the other two capacities to its sub-central units. EMU’s governance structure thereby makes them vulnerable to the divergent effects of financial market instability and consequent recession. These effects can only be ameliorated with the central fiscal and regulatory capacities that EMU does not have.

The introduction provides an overview of the historical precedents to the most recent housing crisis, examining how in previous crises falling housing prices, disruptions to financial markets and institutions and declines in consumer spending affected economic downturns. There is a special focus on the American housing busts of the 1920s and 1930s, with attention given to the measurement of housing prices, the resolution of failed financial institutions, and the mid-century scholarship that helped to define current academic and policy paradigms. The causes behind the usually rapid rise in homeownership in post-War World II US that helped to define the current market are investigated. Other essays examine the creation and evolution of mortgage markets in Germany and the Netherlands, providing a striking contrast to American institutions.

This chapter takes a close look at the boom–bust pattern that characterizes many industries. During the boom period, there is a dramatic accumulation of physical capital—think of the huge efforts to lay broadband during the Internet boom of the late 1990s—followed by a contraction. The chapter examines the experiences of railroads during the Great Depression. This was a difficult period for the industry: the economic downturn, along with increased competition from automobiles and trucks, led to a sharp contraction in demand for railroads. Moreover, access to capital was largely cut off after a period of heavy expenditures. The industry undertook a major restructuring to utilize labor and capital resources more effectively. Both capital and labor inputs declined substantially. Yet logistical innovation enabled railroads to record slightly more revenue ton-miles of freight and book almost as many passenger miles in 1941 as they had in 1929. Adversity seems to have triggered a wave of innovation in this industry.

The dynamics of invasive spread are diverse and context-dependent, which makes generalization difficult. The broad categorization of the dynamics is useful for discussing the drivers of change for specific invasive range expansion, which typically exhibits four dynamical behaviours: (i) exponential and sigmoidal expansion; (ii) linear expansion with a constant rate of spread; (iii) biphasic expansion with a faster linear expansion following a slower linear expansion; (iv) acceleration with a continuously increasing rate of spread. Invasive range expansion eventually ceases when all accessible and suitable habitat is filled. Debates on key drivers and hypotheses behind each of these four spreading dynamics deserve attention. Discussion also needs to address several other key issues, including the phenomena of residence time and lag phases, the ‘boom-and-bust’ dynamics shown by some invaders, and the discordance in spread across localities and context. This chapter deals with these and other issues in providing a synthesis of the dynamics of spread in the context of invasion science.

Speculators choose ex ante where to invest and cannot easily switch later. This implies that a group of similar investors ends up holding an asset, and when they are hit by a shock, there is no natural buyer, and so the price crashes. It should be noted that the deviation of asset prices from fundamental values that happens. Asset bubbles often are based on inconsistent and diverging views about the future. The chapter presents an analytical framework with heterogeneous beliefs to study the dynamics of collateral values and market values that produce credit cycles. The framework features risky and safe assets. Agents are heterogeneous, with a continuum of subjective probabilities concerning the driving forces behind the fundamentals of the risky asset returns. Agents with more optimistic beliefs about the risky asset would naturally like to acquire as much as they can of the risky asset, but they are also credit constrained by the market value of the collateral. They can use the risky asset in their endowments as collateral to raise debt financing from the less optimistic agents.

Chapter 2 traces the ideational struggles over the Brazilian Amazon from the early explorations of the region by non-indigenous explorers into the 1980s. The chapter specifically highlights the important theoretical undercurrents of how seeing the tropics and the push for modernity in Amazonia became manifested through grandiose development projects and deeply symbolic exertions of state power. This chapter situates the Amazon region as a space fraught with the tension between ecological concerns and state economic planning priorities which often take uneven, incomplete, and erratic forms. These make lasting marks on the landscapes and societal structures in that region, and ultimately provide the ideational foundation for later sustainable development articulations.

Ending the Fossil Fuel Era means beginning a delegitimization, or reconceptualization and revalorization of fossil fuels or, to be precise, humans’ relations with fossil fuels. The authors argue for a shift from fossil fuels as a constructive substance. To do this, a pragmatic, realist politics of the 21^st Century toward starting to stop is needed. In this chapter, the authors outline the biophysical, cultural, ethical, and material reasons why only mitigating the impacts of carbon, rather than going to its source in the ground is denying the real issues and opportunities for this and the next centuries. They challenge readers to use a politics of imaginative realism to undertake an urgent transition.

This chapter discusses exchanges and the different types of exchange rate regimes. It describes how exchange rates impact on real exchange rates, and how movements in the real exchange rate are associated with boom-bust cycles. It also discusses interest parity.

This chapter describes the major changes in the Spanish economy over the period since the late 1970s and how these gave rise to the trends in inequality and household incomes it tracks. The substantial increases in real wages and incomes over the period, and how these differed over different sub-periods in the context of macroeconomic fluctuations, are emphasized. The changes in employment at individual and household level that took place alongside significant developments in the tax and transfer systems are brought out as major factors underpinning household income change. The contrast between the growth registered in the decades up to the economic Crisis and the severity of the recession it brought on is highlighted, and the extent of the impact of the recession on employment and household incomes is driven home.