This paper investigates different theoretical models of incentives for teachers in education. It highlights key characteristics likely to render incentives successful in encouraging productive behaviour, provides evidence of where these systems have been successfully and unsuccessfully...

This paper provides a non-technical, snapshot-like profile of poverty in South Africa based on two surveys recently conducted by Statistics South Africa: the Income and expenditure survey of households 2005/06 (IES2005) and the General household survey 2006 (GHS2006). It uses various “poverty...

Despite South Africa’s transition from apartheid in 1994, the social landscape is still fragmented along racial lines. However, South Africa has an impressive social grants system by international standards, with social assistance spending as a percentage of GDP comparing to Western European...

Trade unions played an important role in South Africa’s transition from apartheid in 1994 and continue to play a very public role in the South African economy. Trade unions are found to have had an increasingly positive effect on members’ wages, although it appears that this increase has...

More than a decade after South Africa’s transition from apartheid, the racially delineated picture of education in the country remains. Brahm Fleisch (2008) refers to the South Africa’s education system as consisting effectively of two education systems: the well-performing historically...

This paper makes use of hierarchical linear modelling to investigate which teacher characteristics impact significantly on student performance. Using data from the SACMEQIII study of 2007, an interesting and potentially important finding is that younger teachers are better able to improve the...

Educational quality is a challenged facing the South African schooling system. It is widely acknowledged that teachers play a central role in the quality of education received by students, and that the quality of teachers is largely dependent on the wage they are offered in the teaching...

The derivation of a subjective value of time (SVT) requires finding the marginal rate of substitution between travel time and cost in a travel choice model. In the typical case of models with linear-in-parameters utility functions, the SVT is equal to the ratio between the parameters of travel...

This paper studies the effectiveness of countercyclical capital requirements and contingent convertible capital (CoCos) in limiting financial instability, and its associated influence on the real economy. To do this, I augment both features into a standard real business cycle framework with an...