Three years after the seminal work of Black and Scholes on the pricing of European options, Scholes presented a paper in which the impact of taxation on the value of an option is analyzed. We restart this discussion in a simple binomial setting emphasizing the economic principles of replicating...

Calculating greenhouse gas emissions reductions from climate change mitigation projects requires construction of a baseline that sets emissions levels that would have occurred without the project. This paper describes a standardized multiproject methodology for setting baselines, represented by...

This paper is concerned with the determinants of international steam-coal trade. Most work in projecting coal trade has been either qualitative (a consensus of experts) or, if quantitative, has been based on competitive spatial-equilibrium models. Unfortunately, the competitive model of trade...

The study of demographic trends in sub-Saharan Africa though crucial in the assessment of the impact of population size and growth on the overall socio-economic development in the region, has received the least attention due to lack of reliable data for most of the countries. This paper focuses...

Although theories in both evolutionary biology and economics predict that an individual’s health should be associated with the individual’s time preference, no prior study has been done to empirically support or refute such predictions. By collecting detailed measures of health, time...

In the leading chapter of this dissertation, "Unemployment, Vulnerability and Poverty: A New Class of Measures, Its Axiomatic Properties and Applications," we, Kaushik Basu and myself, derive a new class of measures for unemployment or poverty. Measures of unemployment and poverty have usually...

This dissertation consists of three essays in labor and development economics. The first essay, “Bumpy Rides: School to Work Transitions in South Africa,” quantifies the importance of the option to re-enroll in the school to work transition of South African youth. I estimate a structural...

Increasing customer demand for quality products and services have virtuallyforced organisations to adopt quality in every aspect of their business enterprises.Due to dynamic technological, political and economic changes in the world ofbusiness, the science of management is volatile. Higher...

In South Africa, SME development has been identified by government as a priority increating jobs to solve high unemployment.SMEs also often battle to survive in a tough and ever changing business world. There isa high failure rate among many SMEs. Some of the reasons for the high rate of...

This study investigated whether the different home languages of employees of a large financial institution in the Western Cape had an influence of their perception of organisational structure and processes.The author conducted a series of interviews with management-level employees who speak...