We document how we diagnosed data fabrication in the National Income Dynamics Study. Since the fabrication was detected while fieldwork was still on-going, the relevant interviews were re-conducted and the fabricated data were replaced with authentic data. To the best of our knowledge, this is...

This paper examines the impact of military expenditure on economic growth on a large balanced panel, using an exogenous growth model and dynamic panel data methods for 106 countries over the period 1988-2010. A major focus of the paper is to consider the possibility group heterogeneity and...

The consequences of misguided economic and social policies in the previous dispensation remain evident in the structure of poverty in South Africa. Enforced migration control, job reservation for whites and inadequate education and public services have all left their mark on the social and...

Social networks are increasingly being recognised as having an important influence on labour market outcomes, since they facilitate the exchange of job related information. Access to information about job opportunities as well as perceptions about the buoyancy of the labour market depend...

This paper makes use of the Cape Area Panel study (CAPS), a longitudinal study of youth and their families in metropolitan Cape Town in order to broaden the empirical body of evidence of the causal impact of parental death on children’s schooling in South Africa in two dimensions. First,...

Cash transfer programs are used as new policies to increase nutrition and human capital of children from poor families. We evaluate South Africa's unconditional Child Support Grant (CSG) in which cash grants are made to families with no strings attached. However, in contrast to the...

It is widely agreed that studying the relationship between school quality and academic achievement will benefit public investment in education. This is particularly true in Africa where, the 1990 World Conference on ‘Education for All’ led to renewed commitments to quality basic education....

This paper discusses the theoretical background to handling missing data in a multivariate context. Earlier methods for dealing with item non-response are reviewed, followed by an examination of some of the more modern methods and, in particular, multiple imputation. One such technique, known as...

In a globalising world, the pace of human mobility has increased alongside flows of capital and goods. Regional integration and trade liberalisation have accompanied these trends and have, arguably, received more attention from both academic researchers and policymakers. Human movement, however,...

This paper seeks an explanation for the large differences in the extent and severity of poverty published respectively in van der Berg et al (2005: 2007a) and Meth (2006b). Headcounts in 2004 suggested by van der Berg et al (2007a) exceed by five million, those reported by (Meth, 2006b)....