Most nationally representative household surveys in South Africa collect data on money-metric measures of well-being (income and expenditure), which are then used to generate statistics on poverty and inequality. However, these measures may be limited in several ways. First, they typically are...

Poverty may influence HIV risk by increasing vulnerability to economic shocks and thereby preventing key health investments. We explored this by examining the relationship between household shocks and the timing of traditional male circumcision, a practice associated with considerable expense...

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...

We use longitudinal data from the National Income Dynamics Study (NIDS) to document the extent of recent short-term residential and household compositional change in South Africa. We analyze the demographic correlates of these transitions, including population group, age, urban/rural status, and...

Although HIV-related stigma is known, in general, to deter HIV-testing, the extent to which different dimensions of stigma independently influence testing behaviour is poorly understood. We used data on young black men (n=553) and women (n=674) from the 2009 Cape Area Panel Study to examine the...

We explore the effect of income inequality and social attitudes on the cooperation and sanctioning in nine South African fishing communities where allocation of fishing rights have been unequal and controversial. In the Punishment treatment aggregate contributions towards the public good are...

Gauging levels of welfare using data on income and expenditure is informative yet limited and can be enhanced by including non-money-metric measures. Nationally representative data sets from 1993 and 2010-2011 which cover a broad set of domains are used to calculate a multidimensional poverty...

Evidence on long-term multigenerational dynamics is often inadequate as large datasets with multiple generations remain very uncommon. We posit that genealogical records can offer a valuable alternative. Rather than exploring the intergenerational transmission of socioeconomic status, we rely on...

An Apartheid-driven spatial mismatch between workers and jobs leads to high job search costs for people living in rural areas of South Africa—costs that many young people cannot pay. In this paper, we examine whether the arrival of a social grant – specifically a generous state old age...