Working Papers

The centrality of electricity to everyday life is indisputable, and the price thereof can have significant implications. Literature is inconclusive over the effect of the renewable energy share in the energy mix on retail electricity price as country-specific regulatory policy has a significant...

While subsistence poaching is a large threat to wildlife conservation in Southern Africa, this behaviour is seldom researched. Individual and community level factors that really drive such behaviour are less understood because of both lack of data and literature’s predominant focus on commercial...

The existing literature is clear that low income economies tend to suffer from foreign exchange shortages exacerbated by their exports. Most importantly, the concentration of their exports renders these countries susceptible to international price fluctuations. This frequently affects the level of...

Policymakers need better information regarding wellbeing inequality to ascertain the contributing factors and to determine whether policy has been successful in improving the spread over time. In this paper, we construct a multidimensional composite wellbeing measure, at a micro level, which...

Although the efficiency of the water sector has been studied extensively utilising data envelopment analysis (DEA), the literature tends to use the conventional DEA model to compute efficiency scores. However, conventional DEA input/output data may contain random errors, which may result in...

We study substitution between fixed and mobile broadband services in South Africa using survey data on 134,000 individuals between 2009 and 2014. In our discrete-choice model, individuals choose fixed or mobile and data services in a framework that allows them to be substitutes or complements. We...

This paper considers the implications of the counter-cyclical loan-to-value (CcLTV) regulation in a setting where different types of borrowers from distinct sectors of the credit market co-exist. To identify the optimal policy design, we consider two macro-prudential policy regimes, nanely generic...

We test for the distributional effects of regulation and entry in the mobile telecommunications sector in a highly unequal country, South Africa. Using six waves of a consumer survey of over 134,000 individuals between 2009-2014, we estimate a discrete-choice model allowing for individual-specific...

This paper investigates the impact of rand shocks on industry output and various other South African macroeconomic variables. We use a factor augmented model, which has the key advantage of providing a rich narrative about the disaggregated impacts of exchange rate shocks. We show that the currency...

This paper provides estimates of the elasticity of substitution and total factor productivity (TFP) for South Africa. Estimates are based on constant elasticity of substitution (CES) production functions. Estimates of potential output and the output gap implied by different CES model specifications...