The South African old-age social pension has been much studied by both researchers and policy makers, in part for the larger lessons that might be learned about behavioral responses to cash transfers in developing countries. In this paper, we quantify the labor supply responses of prime-aged...

Empirical explorations of the growth and productivity impacts of infrastructure have been characterized by ambiguous (countervailing signs) results with little robustness. A number of explanations of the contradictory findings have been proposed. These range from the crowd-out of private by...

Many companies establish collaborative relationships (CRs) with suppliers either alongside or in preference to purchasing parts through a process of competitive bidding (CB). CRs over flexibilities and options arising mainly from th"looseness" of the contractual relationship. One significant...

The paper uses a 52-country panel-data for the period 1980-2002 to estimate demand for electricity and telecom services and, based on these estimates, project investment needs in South Africa through 2010 for two growth scenarios. Projections of average annual investment needs in electricity and...

Using three different panel data sets, we show: (i) that mark-ups are significantly higher in South African manufacturing industries than they are in corresponding industries worldwide; (ii) that competition policy (i.e a reduction of mark-ups) should have largely positive effects on productivity...

Aumann (1976) derives his famous we cannot agree to disagree result under the assumption of rational Bayesian learning. Motivated by psychological evidence against this assumption, we develop formal models of optimistically, resp. pessimistically, biased Bayesian learning within the framework of...

Many analysts use band-pass filters to remove so-called permanent components from output and then study the remainder, which is then termed the "business cycle". Building on the critique of these deviation cycles by Harding and Pagan and on the recent work on the mediumterm persistence of...

Persistently high unemployment in South Africa, especially in the face of improved economic conditions since 1994, begs the question: Does unemployment in South Africa respond to changes in output? When considering the linkages between output and unemployment, it is useful to decompose...

This paper develops a stochastic model of grade repetition to analyze the large racial differences in progress through secondary school in South Africa. The model predicts that a larger stochastic component in the link between learning and measured performance will generate higher enrollment,...

Is there a Phillips curve relationship present in South Africa and if so, what form does it take? Traditionally the way to estimate the Phillips curve is merely to regress the change in the price level on a measure of the output gap (or the deviation of actual unemployment from the NAIRU)....