The Skyscraper Index is a concept put forward by Andrew Lawrence, a property analyst at Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, in January 1999,[1][2] which showed that the world's tallest buildings have risen on the eve of economic downturns.
Two record-breaking skyscrapers, the Singer Building and the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company Tower, were launched in New York before the panic and completed in 1908 and 1909, respectively.
The last example available to Lawrence, the Petronas Twin Towers, opened in the wake of the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis and held the world height record for five years.
[10] The concept was revived in 2005, when Fortune warily observed five media corporations investing in new skyscrapers in Manhattan[3] (none of them, including the tallest, the New York Times Building, broke any records).
[17] Thornton argues that completion of the Woolworth Building was followed by a third-worst-ever quarterly decline in gross domestic product, thus it should not be considered an exception from the rule (as Lawrence himself did).
In October 2009, the construction company Emaar announced that it had completed the exterior of the building; within two months, the Dubai government came close to defaulting on its loans.
Stephen Bayley from The Daily Telegraph commented, "For all the ambition of its construction, Dubai's new Khalifa Tower is a frightening, purposeless monument to the subprime era".
First, the paper looks at the announcement and completion dates of the world's tallest buildings and the peaks and troughs of the United States business cycle, as measured by the National Bureau of Economic Research.
They investigate the time series relationship between the tallest building completed each year and the level of per capita GDP for the United States, Canada, China, and Hong Kong.