This paper analyzes the impact of high school household income and scholastic ability on post-secondary enrollment in South Africa. Using longitudinal data from the Cape Area Panel Study (CAPS), we analyze the large racial gaps in the proportion of high school graduates who enroll in university...

This paper examines changes in individual real incomes in South Africa between 1995 and 2000. We document substantial declines--on the order of 40%--in real incomes for both men and women. The brunt of the income decline appears to have been shouldered by the young and the non-white. We argue...

We estimate the returns to internal migration in South Africa. These appear to be the first nationally representative estimates of the return to migration for any African country-- a somewhat surprising claim for a literature that's over 60 years old. We develop a framework to analyze individual...

This paper uses national household survey data to examine changes in real per capita incomes in South Africa between 1993 and 2008; the start and the end of the first fifteen years of post-apartheid South Africa. These data show an increase in average per capita real incomes across the distribution....

The South African old-age social pension has been much studied by both researchers and policy makers, in part for the larger lessons that might be learned about behavioral responses to cash transfers in developing countries. In this paper, we quantify the labor supply responses of prime-aged...

Building on standard marital matching models, we show that a variety of underlying social preferences about a given trait all generate positive assortative matching on that trait, and hence the same distribution of spousal trait differences in equilibrium. Applying this result to U.S. Census and...

This paper provides a critical look at recent empirical work in international trade theory. The paper addresses the issue of why empirical work in international trade has perhaps not been as influential as it could have been. The paper also provides several suggestions on directions for future...

In this paper we develop some simple models of optimal tax and tariff policy in the presence of global corporations that operate in an imperfectly competitive environment. The models emphasize two important differences in the practical application of tax and tariff policy - tax, but not tariff,...

This paper takes a novel approach to trying to disentangle the impact of globalization on wages by focusing on changes in the return to speaking English, the international language of commerce, in South Africa as that country re-integrated with the global economy after 1993. The paper finds that...

In this paper, we test some propositions about international trade flows that are derived from a model of monopolistic competition developed by Elhanan Helpman. We investigate whether the volume of trade between OECD countries is consistent with the predictions of a modal in which all trade is...