Measures of education quality – primarily, years of schooling or literacy rates – are widely used to ascertain the contribution of human capital formation to long-run economic growth and development. This paper, using a census of 4,678 mission station residents, documents for the first time...

Existing empirical research on consumption patterns of the South African black middle class leans either on the theory of conspicuous consumption or culture-specific utility functions. This paper departs from treatment of the black middle class as a homogenous group. By differentiating between a...

This paper establishes the prevailing financial factors that influence credit spread variability, and its impact on the U.S. business cycle over the Great Moderation and Great Recession periods. To do so, we develop a dynamic general equilibrium framework with a central role of financial...

In the late 1980s Robert Ross and co-author Pieter van Duin reversed the widely accepted view of the Cape economy as a ‘social and economic backwater’ of widespread subsistence farming and overall poverty, scattered with small islands of relatively affluent farmers. Exploring the rich...

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...

This paper sets out to date-stamp periods of historic oil price explosivity (or bubbles) using the Generalized sup ADF (GSADF) test procedure suggested by Phillips et al. (2013). The date-stamping strategy used in this paper is effective at identifying periodically collapsing bubbles; a feature...

Primary school mathematics teachers should, at the most basic level, have mastery of the content knowledge that they are required to teach. In this paper we test empirically whether this is the case by analyzing the South African SACMEQ 2007 mathematics teacher test data which tested 401 grade 6...

This paper analyses the economic viability of slavery in the Cape Colony of southern Africa. It has been extensively documented that the affluence of elites was built on the importation of slaves. However, the Dutch East India Company or Verengide Oost-indische Companje (VOC), which...

This paper investigates the state of teacher pay in the South African labour market by comparing the remuneration received by teachers with that received by their non-teaching counterparts. It makes use of wage data from the Labour Force Surveys spanning 2000 to 2007, and 2010. This enables us...

Mankiw and Reis (2002) propose the Sticky Information Phillips Curve as an alternative to the standard New Keynesian Phillips Curve, to address empirical shortcomings in the latter. In this paper, a Sticky Information Phillips curve for South Africa is estimated, which requires data on...