Browsing by Author "Ardington, Carolyn"

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    Parental death and schooling outcomes in South Africa
    (2008) Ardington, Carolyn; Leibbrandt, Murray
    The HIV/AIDS pandemic is leaving in its wake a generation of children who have lost parents, care-givers, and other loved ones to illness and death. One of the lasting effects of the HIV/AIDS crisis will be the impact it is having on the education of the generation of children now of school going age. This thesis examines the extent to which South African children who have experienced parental loss are vulnerable to poorer educational outcomes. It contributes to the literature on orphans and schooling in Africa in a number of ways. Firstly, I assess the extent to which the vulnerability of orphans to poorer educational outcomes has changed over time as the AIDS crisis deepens in South Africa. This provides an avenue to explore whether the fear that extended families are no longer effective safety nets may be overstated or whether traditional coping strategies are indeed breaking down. At every point in time cross-sectional evidence suggests that orphans are at risk of poorer educational outcomes with maternal deaths generally having stronger negative effects than paternal deaths. Despite a significant increase in the number of orphans over the last decade I find no evidence of a systematic deterioration in traditional coping strategies with respect to orphans' educational outcomes. Secondly, I analyse two geographically and socioeconomically distinct longitudinal datasets to investigate whether parental death effects are causal. My evidence is consistent with mother's deaths having a causal effect on children's schooling. Thirdly, I exploit the longitudinal data to investigate the extent to which orphan disadvantage precedes parental death and whether orphans begin to recover in the period following a parent's death or whether they continue to fall behind. Finally, I investigate the longer run impact of parental loss in childhood on human capital formation by focusing on the completion of secondary school by early adulthood. These results suggest that parental death will reduce the ultimate human capital attainment of the child.
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    Some contributions to the analysis and construction of funds in South Africa
    (1997) Ardington, Carolyn; Bradfield, Dave
    Following international trends, the South African unit trust industry has become one of the fastest growing forms of investment in our financial market. Since the first fund was established in 1965, the industry has grown to over 100 funds with more than 20 companies managing these funds. Since 1990 there has been particularly rapid growth in 'Specialist Equity Funds' with more than 30 new 'specialist' unit trusts emerging. Specialist equity fund managers usually concentrate their investments on a particular sector of the economy or alternately aim to satisfy specific characteristic investment objectives. Two classes of specialist equity funds, namely Index funds and International funds, have emerged recently in our unit trust industry and are receiving increasing attention from the investment community. Much attention therefore is given to these funds in this thesis. The growing importance of the unit trust industry has heightened the need to effectively and accurately measure the performance of managed funds. A wealth of literature exists in this field and a number of models have been developed to measure the performance of managed funds and the fund managers themselves. This thesis reviews and demonstrates the implementation of these various measures with the emphasis on providing a practical interpretation of each measure. Although the recent development of Index funds and International funds has received considerable attention in the financial media, little attention has been paid to the technical aspects of the construction of these funds in the academic literature. To the authors knowledge there has been no published research on the construction of Index funds or International funds in South Africa. This thesis examines approaches to constructing Index funds and International funds and empirically assesses these approaches on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE).