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Skyscrapers Boom Vs Economic Crisis

In 1999, economist Andrew Lawrence created the skyscraper index; which purported to show that the building of the tallest skyscrapers is coincidental with business cycles, in that he found that the building of world’s tallest building is a good proxy for dating the onset of major economic downturns. Lawrence described his index as an unhealthy 100 year correlation. Do Skyscrapers Predict? Lawrence was apparently the first to make the claim that the construction of the world’s tallest building was correlated with impending financial crisis although the subject of the world’s tallest skyscrapers and their relation to economic crisis is also prominent in Grant (1996).