In the absence of established longitudinal panel surveys in South African, national cross-sectional household survey data are frequently used to analyse change. When these data are stacked side-byside, however, inconsistencies both in time trends and between household and person level data are...

Asset indices have become widely used in a number of areas of social research, particularly in the analysis of Demographic and Health Surveys. Indeed the calculation of "wealth indexes" is now routine practice in the DHSs. Asset indices have been externally validated in a number of contexts....

We analyse the long-term trends in wages in South Africa, using the data from the October Household Surveys, Labour Force Surveys and Quarterly Labour Force Surveys. We show that outliers and missing data need to be taken into consideration when working with these data. Our results show that...

We show that body mass increases with economics resources among most South Africans, although not all. Among Black South Africans the relationship is non-decreasing over virtually the entire range of incomes/wealth. Furthermore in this groupd other measures of success (e.g. employment and...

Analysts of the South African labour market have predominantly used household surveys to analyse the labour market. It has been more difficult to explore labour demand from the firm side, as a result of limited data from relatively small cross sectional firm surveys, mainly funded by the World...

We show that some of the models which have been used in the South African literature to estimate union selection effects are logically inconsistent. This is a much more serious problem than a failure to identify the coefficient. It implies that the model cannot be true in any possible state of...

The 1999 October Household Survey was the first time that Statistics South Africa (Stats SA) introduced a master sample of Enumeration Areas (Stats SA, 2000a). There were several important changes in sampling and field worker practice that accompanied the introduction of the master sample of...

There are many household surveys, e.g. the Demographic and Health Surveys, that carry a wealth of useful information but in which information of interest to economists, chiefly or missing altogether. In many of these surveys, however, there are questions about asset ownership. These might be...

We show that the pseudo empirical maximum likelihood estimator can be recast as a calibration estimator. The process of estimating the probabilities pk of the distribution function can be done also in a maximum entropy framework. We suggest that a minimum cross-entropy estimator has attractive...

When asset indices are used in regressions the coefficients obtained are typically difficult to interpret. We show how lower bounds on expenditure effects can be extracted, if the relationship between the assets and expenditure can be calibrated on an auxiliary data set.