Real estate bubbles occurred frequently during the past thirty years in both developing and advanced economies. Reinhart and Rogoff (2008) evaluated five major developed-country financial crises: Spain in 1977, Norway in 1987, Finland and Sweden in 1991, and Japan in 1992. They found that, averaged across the five crises, residential real estate prices peaked a year before the onset of the financial crisis; house prices had fallen by 22 percent four years after they had peaked. Rogoff and Reinhart (2009) extended their earlier analysis to twenty-two financial crises in both developed and developing countries and found that real estate prices fell in all of them, with a median decline of 35.5 percent. House prices declined more than 10 percent in twenty of the twenty-two crises. They also found that a typical financial crisis is associated with a substantial increase in unemployment and a decline in GDP that lasts for several years, followed by a large increase in government debt. Although their analyses indicated that house-price declines, unemployment, and equity market declines are all associated with financial crises, they did not indicate which factor or factors might have triggered the downturns and which are effects.