Working Papers

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...

This paper estimates a New Keynesian Wage Phillips Curve for South Africa to investigate the responsiveness of nominal wages to labour market conditions. The estimation is based on a model with staggered nominal wages setting, where all variations in hired labour input is taking place at the...

Industrialisation is recognised as important for developing countries’ growth and ‘catching up’ with advanced economies, but is also associated with harmful carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and hence with climate change. This poses a challenge to sustainable development, particularly for late...

This paper investigates the relationship between the education level of household heads and households’ energy-saving practices at the micro-level in South Africa. It uses the community survey of 2016 as data source. Multilevel logistic models are estimated to account for heterogeneity that...

The paper introduces voluntary social distancing to the canonical epidemiology model, integrated into a conventional macroeconomic model. The model is extended to include treatment, vaccination, and government-enforced lockdown. Infection-averse individuals face a trade-off between a costly social...

Energy poverty is a major concern in most of developing countries while its measurement has not been fully addressed due to the complexity of energy basic needs estimation. This study contributes to the literature by measuring energy poverty with focus on household required energy consumption using...