Financial Markets and Retail Construction Cycles (Manuscripts‪)‬

INTRODUCTION AND LITERATURE It is not universally accepted that specific activities such as retail construction have a cycle of their own. It can be argued that time series data with apparent cycles may be nothing more than chance happenings (Markridakis, Wheelwright & Hyndman, 1998). At the macro-economic level it is generally believed that the US economy has a business cycle (Reilly, 1985; Ritter, 1995). A business cycle is a wavelike or oscillating pattern about the secular trend (Mendenhall & Sinich, 1993). Granger and Newbold (1977) argue that when a series is plotted through time it may appear smoother than white noise. The autocorrelation or smoothness can be the effect of sums of cosine waves in the data that form a linear cycle model. Cycles can be two to ten years or longer in length and are not always a function of the overall business cycle (Bowerman & O'Connell, 1987).