Vimal Ranchhod is a Professor in the School of Economics at the University of Cape Town and the Deputy Director of the Southern Africa Labour and Development Research Unit (SALDRU). He is also the head of the South African node of the African Centre of Excellence for Inequalities Research, and has served as an elected member of the ESSA council since 2021. He studied for his undergraduate degrees at Wits University, and was awarded a Mandela scholarship to attend graduate school at the University of Michigan, where he completed his PhD in 2007. He has taught classes on labour economics, econometrics, game theory, microeconomics, and inequality – at both the undergraduate and graduate level – at UCT, Wits, Michigan, and Yale.
His research focuses on labour economics, education, poverty and inequality, and discrimination, and he has published in several journals including the Journal of Development Economics, the Economics of Education Review, World Development, the World Bank Economic Review, the British Journal of Sociology, and the South African Journal of Economics. His research has won the Best Paper award at the African Econometrics Society conference, and the Best Paper award for the Francis Wilson Memorial Prize in 2023. To date, he has co-supervised three doctoral students to completion, and he currently has two students who are working towards their PhDs. He is also the editor of the monthly SALDRU newsletter. He has been a Principal Investigator on the National Income Dynamics Study, on a recently completed DHET study related to financial sustainability in the university sector in South Africa, was the Labour Economics lead in the NIDS-CRAM study, and is about to start a multi-country project on Policy, Politics, and Wealth Inequality that is funded by the Volkswagen Foundation. Vimal was admitted to the Academy of Science of South Africa in 2023, where he also serves on the Standing Committee on the Science for the Reduction of Poverty and Inequality.
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