Lunchtime Seminar - An NPV analysis of buying versus renting for prospective Australian first home buyers

Abstract: This talk will discuss findings from a recent research paper on buying versus renting for Australian first home buyers. The paper compares buying versus renting for prospective first home buyers between 1983 and 2015 in Australia’s eight capital cities, and suggests that buying was favourable to renting for most of this period. The paper is available here

Speakers: Dominic Crowley and Shuyun May Li (University of Melbourne)

Shuyun May Li is a Senior Lecturer at Department of Economics, the University of Melbourne. She joined the University in 2005 after completing her Ph.D. in Economics at the University of Texas at Austin. Her primary research area is Macroeconomics, with particular research interest in financial frictions, housing market and banking. Her research has been published in Journal of Economics Dynamics and Control, Economic Inquiry, Canadian Journal of Economics, the Economic Record.

Dominic Crowley has been a Senior Policy Advisor at the Victorian Department of Premier and Cabinet since November 2016. Prior to working at DPC, Dominic was a Senior Research Economist at the Productivity Commission where he worked on inquiries and research projects including on migration, energy and labour markets.  

Dominic completed a Master of Economics from the University of Melbourne in 2014. His research report was on buying vs renting for Australian first home buyers. This report was motivated by his own decision about whether to buy a home. With his advisor, Shuyun May Li, he turned this report into a journal article which was published in the December 2016 edition of the Economic Record.