Staff profile

Dr James Bugden

Lecturer

Faculty of Business, Economics and Law

School of Economics

Melbourne (Bundoora)

 

Area of study

Economics

Brief Profile

James Bugden was an economics lecturer in Canada (1989 - 2001) at Wilfrid Laurier University, University of Waterloo and St. Thomas University. He has been at LaTrobe University since 2002 and appointed as a Lecturer B in 2005. In 2002 and 2003, he taught one semester as a guest lecturer at the European Economic Research Consortium (EERC) graduate school in Kyiv, Ukraine.

Primary research interests include housing, price indices, industrial organisation and microeconomics.

Teaching Units

ECO4MIE Economics 4 (Honours)

ECO3IND Industrial Organisation

ECO2IQA Introduction to Quantitative Analysis

Research projects

"Parametric versus Non-parametric Hedonic Analysis of Tax Changes on House Prices" (with I. Fraser, J. Racine, R. Waschik).

The Melbourne property market has experienced rapid price increases. It is argued that the First Home Owner Grant (FHOG) introduced on 1 July 2000 has contributed significantly to these price increases. The  FHOG provides a natural experiment to evaluate the effects of an external shock (i.e., government subsidy) on housing prices in Australia. We explain the behaviour of housing prices in Melbourne between 1996-2001 by employing hedonic pricing functions.  To estimate the model we employ recent developments in nonparametric estimation techniques that have been shown to significantly improve the econometric estimates derived. Thus, this project provides a better understanding of the forces driving housing prices and the impact of external shocks.

 

"Quality-Adjusted Repeat-Sales House Price Indices"

 We construct a novel way to incorporate renovations into the repeat-sales model that controls for changes in housing quality between sales. The attractiveness of the method we propose is that it controls for changes in quality while maintaining the parsimony and simplicity of the repeat-sales model and is consistent with the theory underlying the model.

 

"Quality-Adjusted Repeat-Sales House Price Indices: Melbourne 1992 - 2002"

We measure the house price inflation in Melbourne 1992Q1 – 2002Q2. We modify the standard repeat sales model by incorporating renovations and a neighbourhood variable to control for quality changes. We find that the standard repeat sales model significantly over-estimated house price inflation. We also find that, controlling for neighbourhood, slower selling houses – houses with long times between sales – appreciate more than quick selling houses.