The extent of social mobility is one of three key considerations - along with living standards and the level of inequality - in any assessment of a society’s economic merits. The intergenerational correlation (IGC) between the incomes of parents and their children provides a summary...

This paper reports the results of an economic experiment which was designed to test the effect of racial identity on generosity in a non-strategic setting. A sample of undergraduate University students was recruited to participate in a Dictator game, where surnames of individuals were revealed...

We study a Lucas (1978) "fruit-tree" economy under the assumption that agents are Choquet expected utility (CEU) rather than standard expected utility (EU) decision makers. The agents’ non-additive beliefs about the economy’s stochastic dividend payment process may thus express...

Concerns have been raised in regards to how to redress a decreasing trend in national saving in South Africa. A number of authors have suggested that redressing government saving, through fiscal discipline characterised by a low government budget deficit ratio, should be a key in redressing the...

This article examines the co-movement between a leading first-world economy (Germany) and an emerging market economy (South Africa) by applying a dynamic factor model. These countries have been chosen as proxies to analyse the channels of transmission of positive supply and demand shocks in...

Ample psychological evidence suggests that people’s learning behavior is often prone to a "myside bias" or "irrational belief persistence" in contrast to learning behavior exclusively based on objective data. In the context of Bayesian learning such a bias may result in diverging...

The maintenance of price stability is widely recognised as the primary goal of modern monetary policy, and the management of private sector inflation expectations has become an essential channel through which this goal is achieved. This evaluation aims to improve the understanding of how the...

Commentators claim a shortage of skills, particularly artisanal labour, in South Africa is constraining output and that a rise in skill supply would benefit less skilled occupations. This assumes/implies skilled and unskilled labour are q-complements. This paper estimates Hicks Elasticities of...

This paper attempts to isolate the conditions that give rise to loss leader pricing. I show that for sufficiently low distance between firms, the advertised good is priced below cost irrespective of whether firms advertise the same or different products. Instead, if products are sufficiently...

A large number of child deaths in developing countries could be averted if ill children received care sooner rather than later. This paper analyses the healthcare treatment pathway that is followed for children under the age of six. The majority of these children receive treatment within 24...