TY - RPRT AU - Ngai, L. Rachel AU - Sheedy, Kevin D. TI - The Ins and Outs of Selling Houses: Understanding Housing-Market Volatility PY - 2023/Nov/ PB - Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) CY - Bonn T2 - IZA Discussion Paper IS - 16603 UR - https://www.iza.org/publications/dp16603 AB - The housing market is subject to search frictions in buying and selling houses. This paper documents the role of inflows (new listings) and outflows (sales) in explaining the volatility and co-movement of housing-market variables. An 'ins versus outs' decomposition shows that both inflows and outflows are quantitatively important in understanding fluctuations in houses for sale. The correlations between sales, prices, new listings, and time-to-sell are shown to be stable over time, while the signs of their correlations with houses for sale are found to be time varying. A calibrated search-and-matching model with endogenous inflows and outflows and shocks to housing demand matches many of the stable correlations and predicts that correlations with houses for sale depend on the source and persistence of shocks. KW - search frictions KW - inflows and outflows KW - housing-market cyclicality KW - match quality ER -