Browsing by Author "Eyal, Katherine"

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    A small push goes a long way: An evaluation of the cumulative effects of a cash transfer on South African youth
    (2021) Jani, Tafadzwa; Eyal, Katherine
    Persistently high poverty rates in developing countries have negatively affected social welfare outcomes, including infant mortality, food security, life expectancy, and educational attainment. In the late 2010s, depressed household incomes endured in many developing countries in the Americas, Africa and Asia. Cash transfer programs were introduced in many low-income countries in the 1990s, often intended to reduce poverty and increase human capital. South Africa launched the child support grant (CSG) in 1998, an unconditional cash transfer for children below the age of seven. By 2017, the program boasted twelve million beneficiaries, with an upper age limit of eighteen. Globally, initial evaluations of cash transfers (including the CSG) focused on children, and the short-term impacts on education, health, and consumption. However, fewer evaluations of the impact of extended receipt have taken place, particularly using older beneficiaries who experience lifelong receipt. This thesis analyses the long-term effect of CSG receipt on youth outcomes. Observing a positive CSG effect on South African youth would be encouraging, given that 3.3 million youth were not involved in any employment, education, or training in 2018. The literature focussing on older youth outcomes and long-term receipt primarily examines educational outcomes, mainly evaluating cash transfer programs in North America. This thesis draws on the National Income Dynamics Survey, a nationally representative longitudinal study conducted in South Africa between 2008 and 2017. Both the irregular expansion pattern of the CSG, and the panel nature of the survey are utilised to estimate grant impact on two cumulative outcomes (educational achievement and physical health, measured by height), and two current outcomes (labour force participation and mental health), using a youth sample aged between fifteen and twenty-seven. Those experiencing a higher duration of CSG receipt display higher educational achievement, higher average height and lower labour force participation. However, no significant effects are found on mental health. These results suggest extended receipt of an unconditional transfer may positively impact human capital accumulation, while current outcomes are less likely to be affected (World Bank 2016).
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    An evaluation of the determinants and implications of panel attrition in the National Income Dynamics Survey (2008-2010)
    (South African Journal of Economics, 2015-05-28) Baigrie, Nic; Eyal, Katherine
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    Choice under Uncertainty
    (2013) Eyal, Katherine
    This lecture note series in Microeconomics looks at risk, risk seeking, risk neutrality and risk aversion. uncertainty, and choice.
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    Costs
    (2013) Eyal, Katherine
    These lecturer notes address costs in the short term and long term, the short-term and long-term cost curves, and the relationship between these curves. This resource is aimed at first-year economics students, and can be used by lecturers looking to improve their lecture materials or for students looking for revision materials.
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    Factor Markets: Labour
    (2013) Eyal, Katherine
    These lecture notes look into the labour market as a factor of production, looking at the various factors that influence labour as an input in production. This resource is aimed at first-year economics students, and can be used by lecturers looking to improve their lecture materials or for students looking for revision materials.
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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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    The impact of emotional ‘affect’ on municipal budget transparency in South Africa: a randomised control trial using PAIA requests
    (2014) Van der Mey, Stephanie; Eyal, Katherine
    This paper aims to assess the effectiveness and transparency outcomes of an access to information mechanism in South Africa enshrined in the Protection of Access to in Information (PAIA) Act of 2000. A randomized control trial is conducted to assess whether emotional influences known as ‘affect’ in PAIA requests can improve the transparency outcomes of the request process. The hypothesis that aggressive requests can achieve more transparent outcomes is supported by the data, with response times to requests being 3.6 days shorter on average in the treatment group relative to the control group. However, aggression in requests has a weak effect in terms improving other transparency outcomes. The robustness of the outcomes is limited by low response rates overall leading to limited measurable statistical significance. The social implication suggested by the results is that the PAIA request mechanism is often ineffective in achieving increased transparency, and is subject to manipulation.
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    Mathematics for Economists
    (2014-08-21) Eyal, Katherine
    This resources consists of comprehensive notes, tutorials and solutions for Honours level economics. Material covered includes linear algebra, comparative statics, optimisation, integration and differential equations and systems of difference and differential equations, eigenvalues, complex numbers. These notes, tutorials and solutions cover the basic tools and applications in order to prepare the student for the study of Macroeconomics, Microeconomics and Econometrics at an intermediate and advanced level.
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    Mathematics in 2nd Year Microeconomics
    (2013) Eyal, Katherine
    This series of lecture notes explains and illustrates mathematical concepts used in 2nd year Microeconomics at the University of Cape Town. These concepts include matrices, Markov chains, non-Singularity, Jacobian determination, differentials and elasticity, the implicit function theorem, Maclaurin and Taylor series, and Lagrange multiplication.
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    Quantitative methods for economics
    (2011) Eyal, Katherine
    Mathematical economics involves the application of mathematics to the theoretical aspects of economic analysis, while econometrics deals with the study of empirical observations using statistical methods of estimation and hypothesis testing. These two are complementary - theories must be tested against empirical data for validity and statistical work needs economic theory as a guide in order to determine the appropriate direction of research. This resource contains tutorials and solutions for mathematics and econometrics and can be used by educators or students in introductory economics courses.
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    School Enrolment and the Child Support Grant: Evidence from South Africa
    (2015-05-28) Eyal, Katherine; Woolard, Ingrid
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    The associations of cash transfers and childcare for the development of children born to adolescent and young mothers in South Africa
    (2025) Tatham, Claire; Eyal, Katherine; Jochim, Janina
    Exposure to adversities strongly predicts early childbearing among adolescent girls and young women. Early motherhood is associated with negative effects on their children's developmental outcomes, but the factors contributing to the well-being of children born to adolescent mothers remain uncertain. The Child Support Grant (CSG) emerges as a potential avenue of support. This paper analysed cross-sectional data of adolescent mother-child dyads (N =1,046 mothers; 1,144 children) from the Eastern Cape of South Africa, collected between 2017 to 2019. Adolescent and young mothers (aged 10-19 at the birth of their first child) completed questionnaires on their well-being and health. The Mullen Scales of Early Learning Composite Score was used to measure children's cognitive performance in expressive language, receptive language, visual reception, and fine motor domains. This study assessed factors associated with CSG receipt and early CSG receipt. Additionally, this study tested the association between CSG receipt and child development, and the moderating role of formal childcare. The results reveal socioeconomic factors such as having sibling, low maternal education and caregiver support to influence CSG access and timeliness. Moreover, both early CSG receipt and formal childcare had a significant positive effect on child development. To ensure timely access to CSG receipt, SASSA offices should run outreach campaigns targeting first-time adolescent mothers with low levels of education and intervention promoting caregiver support. There is also a need to develop flexible CSG policies that recognise the essential role of different family members and provide additional support. Social protection systems for children of adolescent mothers requires approaches that acknowledge the role of maternal human capital development in determining child outcomes and takes advantage of age-related opportunities for intervention.
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    The impact of the social relief & distress grant on poverty in South Africa
    (2025) Fatch, Martha; Eyal, Katherine
    This paper examines the impact of the Social Relief & Distress grant on poverty reduction in South Africa amidst the COVID-19 global pandemic. A large number of individuals live below the poverty line in South Africa and the lockdowns used to combat the spread of COVID-19 have resulted in more people living below the poverty line. This paper uses secondary data in South Africa, utilising all five waves of the NIDS-CRAM panel survey, with an initial sample frame of 7,073 participants. This data is used to estimate the impact of a new cash transfer on household poverty using a number of different techniques. In initial estimates, a strong negative correlation between receipt of the Social Relief & Distress grant and household poverty is observed, as expected. However, in multivariate analysis this negative association is reduced, with an effect found which is neither practically nor statistically significant. While the SRD could reduce some proportion of household poverty in certain samples, this effect is not large enough to meaningfully impact average household socio-economic status in South Africa. Increasing the grant size and broadening its reach could have a significant impact on household poverty and overall inequality.
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    The Intergenerational Transmission Effect of Depression: Causality, Resilience & Decomposition
    (2022) Mthembu, Simeme; Eyal, Katherine
    Since the 1990s, the burden of disease associated with poor mental health has continued to rise in South Africa. One third of South Africans will suffer from poor mental health in their lifetime if either parent also suffers from poor mental health, and this intergenerational transmission effect of depression is large and highly significant. Previous work has attempted to investigate whether it is nurture or nature effects which drive this large transmission effect. While this work has found that it is primarily environmental factors which account for this transmission of depression from mother to child, this does not properly identify the extent of each component, and in which contexts the one is more important than the other. Despite the prevalence of poor mental health, the intergenerational transmission of mental illness in South Africa is equally understudied. Investigating whether this intergenerational transmission of depression is a causal effect or merely a correlation poses a major challenge for inference. This thesis estimates causality in the intergenerational transmission effect of depression from parent to individual, and finds that parental depression is the the single largest determinant of individual depression. That is, individuals with depressed parents are more likely to suffer from depression themselves. This thesis also attempts to explore vulnerability and resilience to this transmission effect and finds that a mother's depression is the largest and most important determinant of transmission of depression from a father. The opposite is also true - a father's depression is the single and largest determinant of transmission of depression from a mother. Upon further investigation of the key determinants of resilience or vulnerability to transmission using the Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator (lasso) model, this paper finds that hardly any other genetic or environmental characteristics have been found to be significant determinants of transmission. Parental depression alone has the largest effect on whether an individual is resilient or vulnerable to transmission from another parent. This paper finds that the environment does not seem to have as large of an effect on resilience or vulnerability to transmission of depression as was previously thought in the literature - only parental depression seems to have an effect on transmission of depression.
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    The Theory of Consumer Behaviour: cognitive limitations and consumer behaviour
    (2013) Eyal, Katherine
    These lecture notes look at consumer behaviour and cognitive limitations, specifically targeting rational and irrational behaviour, bounded rationality, sunk costs, and affective forecasting errors.
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    Theory of the firm and market structure: Production
    (2013) Eyal, Katherine
    These lecture notes look at production in the long and short run, as well as Returns to Scale. This resource is aimed at first-year economics students, and can be used by lecturers looking to improve their lecture materials or for students looking for revision materials.
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    Throwing the book at the CSG
    (Southern Africa Labour and Development Research Unit, 2015-05-28) Eyal, Katherine; Woolard, Ingrid
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