South African white maize is considered to be significantly more volatile than any other agricultural product traded on the South African Futures Exchange (SAFEX). This accentuates the need to effectively manage price risk, by means of hedging, to ensure a more profitable and sustainable maize...

This paper examines whether there necessarily exists a conflict between allocative and productive efficiency in small open economy markets. That productive efficiency favours market concentration is not in dispute, and the sole question we face is whether allocative efficiency suffers under high...

This paper presents a detailed empirical examination of the South African equity premium; and a quantitative theoretic exercise to test the canonical inter-temporal consumption-based asset-pricing model under power utility. Over the long run, the South African stock market produced average...

We combine new developments in decision theory with a standard consumption-based asset-pricing framework. In our model the efficient market hypothesis is violated if and only if agentsÂ’ beliefs' express ambiguity about the stochastic process driving economic fundamentals. Asset price...

The study analyses the nature and behaviour of volatility, the risk-return relationship and the long-term trend of volatility on the South African equity markets, using aggregate-level, industrial-level and sectoral-level daily data for the period 1995-2009. By employing dummy variables for the...

The paper estimates the impact of the South African Child Support Grant (CSG) on child health, nutrition and education. Data from the 2008 South African National Income Dynamics Study (NIDS) are used. Two non-experimental treatment evaluation techniques, both relying on propensity scores, are...

This study exploits a natural experiment to evaluate the gender bias effect associated with negative marking due to gender-differentiated risk aversion. This approach avoids framing effects that characterize experimental evaluation of negative marking assessments. Evidence of a gender bias...

This paper explores the reasons for the unbalanced growth structure of South Africa. While a number of emerging markets show a high proportion of value added and employment being generated by the service sector, South Africa is one of very few such economies that also show a strong decline in...

Rather than a rigid racial ideology, it is argued that South African apartheid was a pragmatic response of a white oligarchy to changing economic and political constraints. Consequently, the degree to which apartheid principles were applied and enforced by the South African state varied over...

The stylized view of the Dutch Cape Colony (1652-1795) is of a poor, subsistence economy, with little progress in the first 143 years of Dutch rule. New evidence from probate inventory and auction roll records show that previous estimates about wealth at the Cape are inaccurate. In contrast to...