Background: HIV counselling and testing (HCT) is a critical component of HIV prevention and treatment efforts. Between April 2010 and June 2011 South Africa ran an ambitious, multi-sector, campaign aiming to test 15 million people nationwide. We assessed the extent to which this campaign reached...

Little credible evidence exists on the effect of material resources on school quality in developing countries. This paper studies the impact of non-personnel funding on educational outcomes exploiting the peculiar way in which these resources are allocated in South Africa. Government funding...

Asset indices have become widely used in a number of areas of social research, particularly in the analysis of Demographic and Health Surveys. Indeed the calculation of "wealth indexes" is now routine practice in the DHSs. Asset indices have been externally validated in a number of contexts....

Although there is fast-growing policy interest in offering financial products to help rural households manage risk, the literature is still scant as to which products are the most effective. This paper uses a randomized field experiment in Senegal and Burkina Faso to compare male and female...

Health care in developing countries is often unreliable and of poor quality, reducing incentives to use quality health services. Using data from a field experiment in India, I show that providing initial quality care improves the demand for quality health care by raising intended health...

This paper presents a survey experiment in South Africa that focuses on the role of mobilization for demand for redistribution. Previous literature has found that providing information on inequality raises concerns about inequality but need not lead to a change in tax preferences. We argue that...

We study the relationship between country of origin and employment prospects for immigrants to South Africa, an emerging host country characterized by high levels of unemployment, labour market imperfections and a scarcity of skills. Using the 2001 South African census, we estimate the...

Political science literature on clientelism has tended to focus primarily on the role of parties and brokers, leaving the demand side of clientelism - the choices of potential clients - relatively unexplored. This paper proposes a formal framework sheding light on the demand side of clientelism....

In a dramatic few years, South Africa shifted from being trapped in an apparently intractable conflict between a dominant white minority and an oppressed black majority to being a democratic state with an outstanding progressive liberal constitution. It moved from being the epitome of racial...

Geographical coordinates such as Global Positioning System (GPS) latitude and longitude estimates form the foundation of many spatial statistical methods. gpsbound allows users to (1) import geographical information from the attribute table of a polygon shapefile based on the identified location...