Working Papers

This paper reports a study done on Cape Town consumers, with the aim to understand how their purchasing decisions are shaped with respect to GMOs. A choice experiment approach was used to examine consumer preferences for biotechnology products in the food market. Four models were run to analyse the...

We study targeted lockdowns in a multi-group SIR model where infection, hospitalization and fatality rates vary between groups—in particular between the “young”,“the middle-aged” and the “old”. Our model enables a tractable quantitative analysis of optimal policy. For baseline parameter values for...

This paper studies the interactions between political and economic incentives to foster forest conversion in Indonesian districts. Using a district–level panel data set from 2001 to 2016, we analyze variation in remotely sensed forest loss and forest fires as well as measures of land use licensing...

Some of the most contested questions in political science and political economy revolve around the conditions under which democratization is likely to happen and when democracy becomes a stable institutional choice. This paper revisits the particular claim in the democratization literature that the...

Following the failure of Saambou bank in February 2002, another seven South African banks failed within a month, including the fifth-largest, and a further five within a year. In total, twenty-two small and mid-sized banks deregistered over two years: half the total number of banks, and nearly 10 per...

We explore the diversity of means by which governments borrow - from commercial banks, sovereign bond issues, official bilateral creditors, and multilateral financial institutions. Although political economy scholars tend to analyze financing instruments in isolation from one another, governments...

I study an expansion of a South African social grant program that provided unconditional cash transfers to adolescents for the first time. Over the period 2009 to 2012, age eligibility for the child support grant was progressively extended from children under 14 to children under 18 years old. I...

In applied studies,