Nitish Kumar
About
I am a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Riverside.
My research lies at the intersection of Macroeconomics and Housing Economics. I aim to analyze the housing market by using search theory and applied microeconomic tools.
I am on the 2024-2025 academic job market.
Contact: nitish.kumar@email.ucr.edu
Job Market Paper
"A Search and Matching Model of Housing and Rental Market Interactions"
Abstract: I present empirical evidence that rental vacancy rate is correlated with prices and liquidity in the housing market. A decrease in rental vacancies is associated with a “hot” housing market and vice versa. Existing literature considers the rental and the housing market to be two separate markets but this paper aims to build a link between the two. I develop a search and matching model of the housing market which incorporates a rental market with search frictions, heterogeneous buyers and free entry of sellers and landlords. I simulate the model using perfectly correlated demand and supply side shocks to match the new and existing stylized facts. The model shows that a change in rental vacancies affects the agent’s decision to enter the housing market which creates a link between the two markets. The model is able to reproduce the cyclical co-movement of rental vacancies, price to rent ratio, sales, housing vacancies and time to sell. In addition to this, the model is also able to match the upwards sloping Beveridge curve that is observed in the housing and rental market.