Construction and real estate dynamics

Besides being a major constituent of the industrialised economies, many aspects of the construction sector such as its heterogeneity, high volatility, low productivity gains and tendency to generate bubbles make it a particularly fertile field of analysis by modern economic tools. This collection deals with some interesting economic questions related to construction and real estate, namely how construction firms cope with the volatility of construction; whether speculative bubbles or market fundamentals drive those fluctuations; new techniques to predict construction demand; why the office market led the recent real estate cycle; and whether regulation is responsible for speculative behaviour.