Working Papers

We develop a new dataset of bank-level balance sheets data to estimate bank-level funding costs. These estimates are useful for monitoring of funding pressures and other risks to the banking sector as well as understanding the impact of prudential regulations and market conditions on the...

Homeownership by the lower and middle-income households is crucial to create wealth, particularly for South Africa with high levels of economic and wealth inequality. However, scholarship has paid little attention to how income affects the affordable housing market segment despite its systemic...

This study examines the complex relationship between carbon emissions and technological progress in a sample of 60 countries, divided into four categories based on their per capita income between the periods of 1989-2018. For robustness purposes and due to the broad definition of technology, we use...

We estimate that since 1701, South Africa has experienced 163 years of per capita growth of more than 1 per cent a year. These expansions include 55 years of sustained per capita GDP growth of more than 3 per cent a year – windfall periods that were related to the discovery of diamonds and gold,...

A panel data analysis of financial inequality was conducted using the PSTR model to determine the threshold level at which excessive financial development worsens inequality. The results reveal evidence of a nonlinear effect between financial development and income inequality where the optimal...

The 1918 influenza – the Spanish flu – killed an estimated 6% of South Africans. Not all were equally affected. Mortality rates were particularly high in districts with a large share of black and coloured residents. To investigate why this happened, we transcribed 39,482 death certificates from the...

I apply the bunching methodology to South African administrative tax data over the period from 2011 to 2017 to investigate the responsiveness of individual taxpayers to changes in marginal personal income tax rates. I find significant evidence of bunching among the self-employed but no evidence of...

This paper argues that contrary to previous findings, present-day education outcomes in Africa cannot be independently attributed to colonial or pre-colonial ethnic institutions. We propose that it is instead the complementarity or contention between colonial and precolonial institutions that result...

We study the credit channel of monetary policy in South Africa between 2002 and 2019 using banks’ balance sheets. We show that there is a significant heterogeneity within the banking sector in both the loan and deposit sides of the banks’ balance sheets. In response to a contractionary monetary...

We study how taxes and alternative higher education subsidies affect equity-efficiency trade-off for countries at different phases of higher education development. We find a scholarship program is the most efficient higher-education-subsidy program at all stages of higher education development due...