Browsing by Author "Burns, Justine"

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    Boys will always be boys? The impacts of gender-based Affirmative Action and Role Models on competitiveness in the lab
    (2018) Hare, Aimee Elizabeth; Burns, Justine
    Gender differences in labour market outcomes are pervasive in current society. Competitiveness is viewed as a possible factor contributing to the favourable labour market outcomes for men, with the stylised fact being that men are more competitive than women on average. In this study, we experimentally investigate whether institutional structures (gender-based Affirmative Action and Role Models) mitigate the gender differences in competitiveness. Although Affirmative Action has been explored in the literature, the longer-term implications of the preferential treatment creating role model representation have not been examined. Consistent with the literature, we find men have a higher preference for a competitive environment compared with women in our sample. However, there are no significant impacts of the gender based institutional structures on the choice to compete in our experiment. When analysing the responsiveness of performance to a competitive environment and the associated beliefs, we see the female role model treatment encourages a competitive spirit in everyone, whereas the Affirmative Action treatment has a negative effect on the competitive performance of African men. In this experiment, gender-based institutions therefore either have unexpected effects of encouraging competitiveness in all participants, or inadvertently reinforce competitiveness gaps across other dimensions of identity, such as population-group. One therefore needs to be considerate of other dimensions of identity in addition to gender when devising preferential treatment policies, and the resulting role model representation, in practice. Changes in beliefs can only partially be exercised as an explanatory channel for these effects.
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    The economics of language: accents, trust and social exchange in labour markets
    (2014) Yagman, Ece; Burns, Justine
    This thesis examines the role that English language, and accent in particular, might play in strategic interactions characterized by asymmetric information. The experiment in this study - named the Trust Game - is designed to reveal the degree of trust and trustworthiness individuals display towards each other when the only information they receive is the race and linguistic background of their partners. The results indicate that a mother tongue English accent matters in a positive way, both for trust and trustworthiness, and especially for Black participants. The second part of the thesis brings together third party evaluations to unpack the reasons why speaking English might be such a powerful asset to have. Here, the results provide evidence in support of the positive correlation between assessed trustworthiness and assessed positive attributes, especially for Black subjects who speak English with a mother tongue English accent. Overall, the empirical evidence suggests that speaking with a mother tongue English accent matters in strategic interactions and it operates through a strong link with positive connotations. Considering the historical and political background of South Africa and the powerful role that language played in colonialism and apartheid, its role in labour market outcomes is an important policy consideration. This is especially true since the post-1994 constitutional settlement envisages a multilingual setting for the citizens of South Africa.
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    The effect of credit programme membership on food expenditure and child nutrition in rural Malawi : does female headship have a differential effect?
    (2005) Mhango, Yvonne; Burns, Justine; Kesswell, Malcolm
    Although several country-level studies have investigated the impact of access to credit on various outcome variables, few of these studies have looked at the full effect of membership in a credit programme. This study was conducted on a Malawian dataset that was collected through a household rural finance survey. The study differs from other studies in that the operative explanatory variable is not monetary credit but credit programme membership.
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    Ethnolinguistic Diversity and the Provision of Public Goods: Experimental Evidence from South Africa
    (Southern Africa Labour and Development Research Unit, 2015-05-28) Burns, Justine; Keswell, Malcolm
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    Evaluating the Impact of Health Programmes
    (Southern Africa Labour and Development Research Unit, 2015-05-28) Burns, Justine; Keswell, Malcolm; Thornton, Rebecca
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    Evaluating the impact of health programmes on productivity
    (African Development Review, 2015-05-28) Keswell, Malcolm; Burns, Justine; Thornton, Rebecca
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    Follow the child: the effect of an unconditional cash transfer on adolescent human capital and mental health
    (2016) Eyal, Katherine; Burns, Justine
    In company with many other developing countries in the 1990s, South Africa introduced an unconditional cash transfer program for children, which had more than eleven million beneficiaries in 2014. The evaluation of similar cash transfer programs is a widely researched space, however much of the literature focuses on younger children, and outcomes which are both short term, and tangible, such as school enrolment or physical health. Limited research has been conducted on the impact of cash transfers on adolescents and their caregivers, and in particular there is a scarcity of studies on the impact of transfers on the mental health of recipients. This thesis exploits exogenous variation in grant receipt to estimate the current and cumulative grant impacts on the educational and mental health outcomes of teenagers, and the channels through which these effects may take place. The grant is found to have large positive effects on teen enrolment, yet no gains in human capital achievement are seen. The mental health of adolescents is also an under studied area, both domestically and internationally, with few, if any studies performed on the impact of cash transfers on the intergenerational transmission of depression (the single largest determinant of adolescent mental health). This thesis finds that the child support grant largely reduces the impact of a depressed parent on teen mental health, and in particular the grant minimises the considerable negative effect of depressed fathers on teens. There is a literature which suggests that these improvements in teen welfare may stem from improved female bargaining power, which directs more resources to child specific needs, or improved maternal mental health, which improves the parenting and environment experienced by the teen, encouraging both educational achievement and better mental health. Despite this, investigation reveals that the grant has no positive effect on maternal mental health, and if an effect exists for maternal bargaining power, it is very small. This is likely to be due to the relatively modest size of the transfer. This is unfortunate, as this work finds that maternal mental illness has a significant negative impact on teen human capital attainment.
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    Formation of children's human capital in Kenya: The role of teachers, private schools and the family
    (2017) Wamalwa, Fredrick Masinde; Burns, Justine
    In this thesis, we contribute to knowledge about the human capital formation of children in Kenya in three interrelated essays. We focus on Kenya due to the declining learning outcomes the country is experiencing, in the wake of increasing public spending in the education sector. The first essay examines the effect of teacher subject knowledge, pedagogical skill, teacher effective instruction time and teacher classroom practices on grade 4 language and maths test scores. Our results show that a one standard deviation increase in the teacher's knowledge in language (maths) increases student test scores by 0.075 (0.126) of a standard deviation in language (maths). An additional hour of teacher effective instruction time increases student achievement by 0.051 and 0.059 score standard deviations in language and maths, respectively. The second essay estimates the size of the effect of private school attendance on literacy (language) and numeracy (maths) skill acquisition among children drawn from lower primary grades (grades 2-4) in Kenya. Using a household survey data, we apply different estimation techniques (OLS, fixed effects and propensity score matching) to deal with the potential endogeneity of school choice. We find positive and significant effects of private school attendance on both language and maths achievements across all the estimation techniques. For instance, the household fixed effects yield a private school premium of 0.13 to 0.21 score standard deviation in maths and language, respectively. The third essay examines the effect of the gender and order of birth of a child on intra-household investments in, and educational outcomes of, children in Kenya. We measure the intra-household education investment in children by the household's decision to enrol a child in a private school. We define educational outcomes by two variables: completed years of education and relative grade progression. We control for the potential endogeneity of child's gender, birth order, family size and household level unobservables using household fixed effects model. We find no female advantage in terms of private school enrolment. However, there is a consistent female advantage in terms of completed years of education and relative grade progression. We find significant negative birth order effects on private school enrolment, completed years of education and relative grade progression.
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    Gender and Risk Taking in the Classroom
    (Southern Africa Labour and Development Research Unit, 2015-05-28) Burns, Justine; Halliday, Simon; Keswell, Malcolm
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    Getting the message: Using parental text messaging to increase learner attendance
    (2017) Owsley, Nicholas; Burns, Justine
    This paper presents results from a randomised controlled trial in low-income neighbourhoods in Cape Town, South Africa, to test whether parental messages can increase learner attendance at after-school programmes. Parents who were randomly assigned to one of two treatment groups received simple weekly text messages providing them with information about their children's attendance in the previous week. Learners whose parents received text messages attended on average 5.6%-6.1% more after-school sessions than the control group (p<0.01), after controlling for background characteristics and spillover effects. This effect was sustained over the course of the observation period. Structured interviews with parents suggest that those parents who received messages were more likely to engage their children regarding the after-school programme, and were better able to monitor their children's attendance. The intervention cost approximately R1.01 per child per week and has potential for replication. However, good quality data collection systems and regular updates of parent contact information are important for the success of similar interventions. This paper shows that low-cost text messages to poorer parents can increase learners' investment in their education, and shows potential to be scaled up.
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    Handwashing behavior and habit formation in the household: evidence from the pilot randomized evaluation of HOPE SOAP© in South Africa
    (2018) Sellman, Abigail; Burns, Justine; Maughan-Brown, Brendan
    Handwashing with soap at critical times is a simple and effective way to prevent the spread of communicable diseases, such as diarrhea and acute respiratory infection, which are major causes of morbidity and mortality in developing countries. However, rates of handwashing remain low throughout the world, and interventions which attempt to improve handwashing behaviors have largely been unsuccessful in practice. This may be because behavior change programs often fail to recognize the habitual drivers of handwashing behavior. In contrast, this paper examines the effectiveness of a novel soap technology, HOPE SOAP©, a child-size and colorful bar of soap with a toy embedded in its center, which aims to increase handwashing in children by specifically targeting its habitual nature. To rigorously evaluate HOPE SOAP©, this paper exploits data from a pilot randomized controlled trial whereby 229 households from a poor urban community in South Africa were randomly assigned to receive HOPE SOAP© for a period of 12-weeks. In an initial analysis of the effects of the intervention on children’s health and behavior, Burns, Maughan-Brown, and Mouzinho (2017) found that that HOPE SOAP© had positive impacts on children’s handwashing behaviors and health outcomes. Children who received HOPE SOAP© children were more likely to wash their hands, and had better overall health outcomes than control children (Burns, Maughan-Brown, and Mouzinho 2017). Although HOPE SOAP© aims to induce behavior change in children, this paper explores the spillover effects that it has on other members of children’s households. Specifically, this work uses regression analysis to investigate the impacts of HOPE SOAP© on the handwashing behaviors of children’s primary caregivers, and on the health outcomes of all non-treated household members. This paper finds compelling evidence illustrating that a child’s assignment to HOPE SOAP© has a positive impact on the handwashing behavior of their caregiver. Specifically, HOPE SOAP© increases the probability that a caregiver will wash their hands before eating a snack by 13 percentage points on average (p-value 0.17). A further investigation of the causal mechanisms for this improvement suggests that HOPE SOAP© affects caregiver behavior both by disrupting existing poor-hygiene habits, and by strengthening handwashing norms within households. Despite its positive effects on household handwashing behavior, this paper finds that a child’s assignment to HOPE SOAP© has no discernable shortterm impacts on the health of individual household members. Nevertheless, the positive influence of HOPE SOAP© on caregiver handwashing behavior is promising and, in conjunction with the finding that HOPE SOAP© improves children’s behaviors, provides reason to believe the intervention may be successful in inducing habitual handwashing behaviors which can persist in the long run.
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    Happiness, debt & depression Is there a relationship between debt and depression in South Africa?
    (2019) Sklair, Nathan; Burns, Justine
    While poor financial circumstances have been associated with an increased likelihood of depression, the role of personal debt in determining individual mental health is not fully understood. This paper investigates the existence of a causal relationship between individual debt and depression across 5 waves of panel data from the National Income Dynamics Study (NIDS). This paper adds to the existing literature on the relationship between consumer debt and mental health. The paper (i) explores the causal relationship between debt and mental health, (ii) conducts research between debt and mental health in a non-western economy, and (iii) considers the effect of various categories of debt on mental health e.g. mortgage debt, student debt, formal debt and informal debt. By using logistic fixed effects analysis, and exploiting the panel, the analysis controls for unobserved heterogeneity in the causal relationship between debt and depression. The paper finds that (I) Individuals who acquire informal debt in the current period have an increase in the odds of being depressed in both the current and future period. On the other hand, individuals who exhibit evidence of depressive symptoms in the current period have an increase in the odds of acquiring debt in the current period – but past period depressive symptoms do not appear to predict future period informal debt. Therefore, informal debt appears to exhibit characteristics of a bi-directional causal relationship in the current period, with informal debt associated with long term depressive symptoms. (II) Individuals with secure or mortgage debt exhibit a decrease in the odds of being depressed in the future, and (III) There is evidence that an individual who aquires formal debt and already depressed in the current period has a decrease in the odds of exhibiting symptoms of depression in the future period. This means that for unproductive debt categories debt appears to exhibit a negative effect on mental health and thus a decrease in lifetime utility. However, for productive debt categories such as secure debt, there is a positive effect on future mental health which may be argued to be an improvement in lifetime utility.
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    Income Inequality, Reciprocity and Public Good Provision: An Experimental Analysis
    (Southern Africa Labour and Development Research Unit, 2015-05-28) Hofmeyr, Andre; Burns, Justine; Visser, Martine
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    Individual notions of distributive justice and relative economic status
    (Southern Africa Labour and Development Research Unit, 2015-05-28) Barr, A.; Burns, Justine; Miller, L.; Shaw, I.
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    Inequality, Social Sanctions and Cooperation within South African Fishing
    (Southern Africa Labour and Development Research Unit, 2015-05-28) Visser, Martine; Burns, Justine
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    Inheriting the Future: Intergenerational Persistence of Educational status in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa
    (Southern Africa Labour and Development Research Unit, 2015-05-28) Burns, Justine; Keswell, Malcolm
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    Labour market outcomes and the impacts of social networks: evidence from the Cape Town Metropolitan Area
    (2011) Rivett, Craig; Burns, Justine
    This paper examines whether social networks have an effect on the decision to participate in the labour market by individuals in the greater Cape Town area. By using the fourth wave of the Cape Area Panel Study (CAPS) this paper empirically confirms previously examined results of a network effect for employment prospects while confirming that no network effect is present for labour discouragement.
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    Neighbourhood effects in educational outcomes with non-random assignment : a memberships approach
    (2005) De Villiers, Madeleine; Burns, Justine; Keswell, Malcolm
    This paper uses a unique dataset from a large university in South Africa to analyse the role that neighbourhood and race effects play in determining academic performance. In particular, I am interested in ascertaining whether allocation to a particular residence, or group of residences, affects the academic outcomes of first year students. This paper departs from previous studies of peer interactions in higher education as allocation to residence is non-random in this setting.
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    A pre-R year is it worth it, and what would it cost? An applied policy analysis
    (2009) Girdwood, Elizabeth; Burns, Justine
    Science is unequivocal in its support for the importance of early childhood development. Calls for increased investment in young children cite neuroscience, developmental psychology and health. It is hazardous, however, to make a direct leap from neuroscience to policy recommendations. Simply because early childhood provides opportunities for more economically efficient interventions which have dramatic impact on inequality, this does not mean that the ECD policies actually implemented by communities, provinces, or national government are worthy investments. Firstly, it is difficult to design programmes that improve children's cognitive or behavioural development. Secondly, the costs of even effective programmes might outweigh the benefits they generate for children, their families, and taxpayers. And finally, programmes in early childhood require upfront and politically brave investments that may take decades to pay off.