We show that body mass increases with economics resources among most South Africans, although not all. Among Black South Africans the relationship is non-decreasing over virtually the entire range of incomes/wealth. Furthermore in this groupd other measures of success (e.g. employment and...

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...

Earnings questions have been asked in South Africa's national surveys annually since 1994. A key question for labour economists has been to track and explain the evolution of earnings over this post-apartheid period. Unfortunately, however, the measurement instrument has changed in ways that...

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...

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...

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...

Bhorat and van der Westhuizen (2013) use asset indices to explore inequality in post-Apartheid South Africa. We show that the way in which the asset indices were transformed to calculate the Gini coefficients does not preserve the relative ranking of inequality measures on subgroups. This means...

We analyse models in which additional "controls" or proxies are included in a regression. This might occur intentionally if there is significant measurement error in a key regressor or if a key variable is not measured at all. We develop a test of the hypothesis that a subset of the regressors...

We investigate the time allocation decisions by South African learners using the South African Time Use Survey. We show that punctuality appears to be a problem with around 20% of all learners seeming to arrive late. Punctuality and absenteeism seem to be problems disproportionately among poor...

This paper compares estimates of total manufacturing employment from South Africa's 1996 manufacturing census, the 1996 population census and the October Household Surveys from 1995, 1996 and 1997. Findings show that there are 300 000 too few manufacturing workers recorded in the 1996 population...