Swings in Building Permits Can Help Predict Financial Downturns‌

For a new study, Assistant Professor Gustavo Cortes and Yale School of Management’s Cameron LaPoint painstakingly assembled a dataset tracking local building permits over the last century.

Again and again, they found, peaks in the issuing of permits preceded periods of economic turmoil, including the Great Depression, the oil shock recession of the mid 1970s, and the Global Financial Crisis. ‌

Read more in this story from Yale Insights.