From data to mechanism — continuing with Cemil, now under review at JEBO

Created on February 10, 2026

2026   ·   housing   search-matching   mobility   working-paper   JEBO   ·   research-journey

The empirical paper documented that US housing seasonality shifted. This one asks why.

After the MDPI paper came out, Cemil Selcuk — my original undergrad supervisor at UCL, now at Cardiff — and I picked the project back up over the holidays. We turned the empirical pattern into a structural story. He brought the modelling discipline; I brought the data and the calibration. The whole thing was built across vacations and weekends, on top of the MPhil schedule, but the dynamic that started in his STAT0035 office is still what made it work.

We extended Ngai-Tenreyro (2014) search-and-matching to monthly frequency, proved existence and uniqueness of the equilibrium, and calibrated to observed US data.

The headline: a post-2021 shift in the timing of residential moves (SIPP household-mobility data, with Google Trends as a corroborating signal) is sufficient on its own to reproduce the spring shift in both prices and transaction volumes. We don’t need to invoke remote work, credit conditions, or housing supply shocks. The mobility channel alone gets you there. Those other channels may be operating too — they just aren’t required.

The paper is currently under review at the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization (JEBO). Working paper version on SSRN: link.



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