Associate Professor Iqbal Syed PhD

Iqbal Syed works primarily in the areas of economic measurements, index numbers, urban economics, and property economics and finance. He has developed econometric methodologies for measuring productivity and inflation for residential and commercial property markets, and supermarket and high-tech product markets. He has worked on housing markets, investigating property valuations in relation to equilibrium using price-to-rent ratios, price and rent indexes, and the user cost formula. His current research includes the investigation of links between property markets and credit markets, investments, taxation, incomes, financial stability and the macroeconomy.

Iqbal is a member of the Research Committee at the School of Economics and Finance (SEF) and of the Academic Programme Committee at the School of Built Environment, and is the seminar coordinator for SEF (Auckland). Prior to joining Massey University in 2017, Iqbal was a Research Fellow at the UNSW Business School, University of New South Wales, Australia, and was previously a Lecturer in Economics at the University of Dhaka, Bangladesh. He received his PhD in Economics from the University of New South Wales in 2008.

Iqbal has published in journals such as Energy Economics, Economic Inquiry, Journal of Econometrics, Regional Science and Urban Economics, the Review of Income and Wealth (ROIW), and the Journal of Housing Economics. One of his papers was awarded the Kendrick Prize for best paper published in 2016 in ROIW. Iqbal’s research has direct applications for private data compilers, central banks, national statistics agencies, and international organisations such as the OECD and the World Bank. He has been consulted on price indexes, productivity and efficiency measurements by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), APM, CorVal/RF Capital, Moody’s Analytics, MSCI, Reserve Bank of Australia, StatsNZ, Statistics Netherlands, and the World Bank. A consultancy with the International Comparisons Program (ICP) at the World Bank led to a significant contribution to ICP purchasing power parity calculations.

In recent years, Iqbal’s research has focussed on property finance and investments, and urban economics. In one of his ongoing studies, Iqbal is developing methodologies for constructing commercial property price indexes that measure depreciation, productivity and investment value changes in the sector more accurately. In another study, he has been examining the dynamics of land prices in China in order to better understand the political economy of land markets and urban growth in China. Further to a paper he published in 2016, Iqbal is working on improving the measurement of house owners’ rental yields and user costs in order to assess the deviation of the housing market from equilibrium.

Iqbal currently teaches property finance and investment courses at Massey University. He supervises Masters students and PhD candidates working on issues in property economics and finance, including: implications of property taxes on property markets, exploring innovative financing mechanisms for commercial properties, housing affordability and deviation of property markets from their fundamentals, and spillovers between housing and other markets. Iqbal welcomes candidates seeking supervision in property market research, especially those with a particular interest in topics related to property economics, finance and investments.