This paper examines the individual determinants of ethnic identification using large sample surveys (about 30,000 respondents) representative of seven capitals of West-African countries. A small model that relates ethnic identification to an investment in ethnic capital suggests that individuals...

Trends in inequality, poverty, and redistribution in post-apartheid South Africa have received intense attention especially in terms of measuring inequality and poverty levels and the proximate causes of these levels. We review this literature and find a set of established trends. Inequality...

We estimate the effect of a teenage birth on the educational attainment of young mothers in Cape Town, South Africa. Longitudinal and retrospective data on youth from the CAPS dataset are used. We control for a number of early life and pre-fertility characteristics. We also reweight our data...

In attempting to understand cooperation, economists have used the methods of experimental economics to focus on spheres of human behavior in which humans display altruism, reciprocity, or other social preferences through giving and through punishment. Recent work has begun to examine whether...

In the absence of established longitudinal panel surveys in South African, national cross-sectional household survey data are frequently used to analyse change. When these data are stacked side-byside, however, inconsistencies both in time trends and between household and person level data are...

South Africa’s largest active labour market intervention (ALMP) is the Expanded Public Works Programme (EPWP). Its first five-year phase has been completed and a second phase, more ambitious by far than its predecessor, has commenced. Critical analysis suggests that contrary to the hype, the...

This paper analyzes the effect of being born to a teen mother on child health outcomes in South Africa using propensity score reweighting. Exploiting the longitudinal nature of the Cape Area Panel Study, we estimate the probability of being a teen mother conditional on pre-childbirth...

This paper uses a rich longitudinal dataset to examine the relationship between teen fertility and both subsequent educational outcomes and mortality risk in rural South Africa. Human capital deficits among teen mothers are large and significant, with earlier births associated with greater...

Because of their vital role in charting progress (or the lack thereof) in the pursuit of the povert y reduction, statistics are of obvious importance. In South Africa, these leave much to be desired.Disagreements among academics on the severity of poverty, the result of the failure of Statistics...

We present two experiments designed to investigate whether individuals’ notions of distributive justice are associated with their relative (within-society) economic status. Each participant played a specially designed four-person dictator game under one of two treatments, under one initial...