Browsing by Author "Kerr, Andrew"

Now showing 1 - 10 of 10
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Open Access
    Fertility, age, and the motherhood wage penalty in South Africa
    (2022) Torrington, Catherine; Kerr, Andrew
    The difference in earnings between mothers and women without children is well-documented around the world. In developing countries, however, there has been far less research on the effect of fertility on wages for women. In this dissertation, I study the effects of fertility on wages for African women in South Africa. Using the National Income Dynamics Study (NIDS), I study the changes in wages experienced by mothers and non-mothers using panel data methods, as well as Ordinary Least Squares. I find that mothers in South Africa experience a small penalty, but this is not experienced equally for all mothers. Mothers with three or more children experience a greater penalty than mothers with fewer children, while the effects of having young children does not substantially affect the difference in earnings experienced by mothers. Since the majority of women in South Africa become mothers, a high proportion of the employed female population will experience a wage penalty in South Africa. Family- friendly policies, such as subsidized childcare, and flexible working options for mothers, would go a long way to reducing the wage penalty experienced by South African mothers.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Open Access
    Firm Size, Age and Growth in South Africa
    (2018) Allen, Caitlin Shannon; Wittenberg, Martin; Kerr, Andrew
    The relationship between a firm’s size, age and proportional growth rate is examined using multiple samples of South African firm-level data from the early to mid-2000s. The foundation of this study is Gibrat’s Law of Proportionate Effect (Gibrat, 1931), which states that a firm’s proportional growth rate is independent of its absolute size at the start of a given period. It is assumed that firm growth follows a random walk and, therefore, should not be affected by firm size. An implication of Gibrat’s Law of Proportionate Effect is that the firm size distribution is lognormal. However, based on both empirical and theoretical literature, this theory of firm growth has fallen out of favour and been replaced by the proposal that there is an inverse relationship between a firm’s proportional growth rate and both its size and age. Two questions are evaluated in this research using the samples of South African firms. The first is whether the firm size distribution is lognormal. If this is not the case then Gibrat’s Law of Proportionate Effect can be rejected. However, this approach cannot confirm that Gibrat’s theory is valid and will, therefore, be referred to in this paper as a partial test. It was shown that the log firm size distribution was not normal, but rather right-skewed with a Pareto distribution characterising the upper tail. Consequently, Gibrat’s Law of Proportionate Effect was rejected for the datasets of South African firms. This evidence is largely observational and does not explicitly assess the relationship between proportional growth rates and firm size. Therefore, the second question is whether Gibrat’s Law of Proportionate Effect holds. This was investigated by testing conditions derived from Gibrat’s Law of Proportionate Effect, the results of which can lead to either the rejection or acceptance of this proposition. This study extends Gibrat’s research in order to determine the relationship between firm age and proportional growth. Statistical methods, such as Ordinary Least Squares regressions, considering only firms that survived the period under consideration, were used. The results revealed that Gibrat’s Law of Proportionate Effect was invalid and there was a systematic tendency for the smaller, younger South African firms in the datasets to grow proportionally faster than the larger, older firms. This finding supports the view that firm growth is not entirely random.
  • No Thumbnail Available
    Item
    Metadata only
    Job creation and destruction in South Africa
    (South African Journal of Economics, 2015-05-28) Kerr, Andrew; Wittenberg, Martin; Arrow, Jairo
  • No Thumbnail Available
    Item
    Metadata only
    Job creation and destruction in South Africa
    (2015-05-28) Kerr, Andrew; Wittenberg, Martin; Arrow, Jairo
  • No Thumbnail Available
    Item
    Open Access
    Monopsony and Measurement Error in the South African Labour Market
    (2024) Forster, Nicholas; Kerr, Andrew
    In this paper, I analyse the extent to which monopsony power is present in the South African labour market by estimating the wage elasticity of labour supply to the firm, following Manning's (2003) method. I also consider the extent to which the method of identifying jobto-job separations and the use of poorly imputed earnings data by StatsSA changes results. I use panel data from the Labour Force Survey and Quarterly Labour Force Survey in South Africa, although only for waves in the QLFS in which I have earnings data with no imputations by StatsSA. I find a low elasticity of labour supply to the firm in South Africa of between 0,68 and 0,83, which suggests that there is substantial monopsony power in South Africa. These estimates are far off infinity, which suggests that using perfect competition to model the South African labour market is not a realistic assumption. I find little difference in this elasticity to the firm across gender and race overall, but some differences across gender within race and across race within gender. I find that the labour supply of more educated individuals is more elastic to the firm than those with less education and that within higher educated groups, men are supplied more elastically than women. This suggests that education lessens vulnerability to monopsony power, and more so for men. Lastly, I find that results are very sensitive to the method of identifying separations, as well as to the use of the imputed StatsSA earnings data. In both cases, the elasticities estimated are less than half the above estimates. Despite measurement error being a concern, the low estimates of the elasticity to the firm are unlikely to be biased downwards to the extent that the South African labour market more closely resembles perfect competition. Thus, those designing policy for the South African labour market should do so from an assumption that the market is imperfectly competitive. Furthermore, these estimates are not far off estimates using administrative data, which suggests that survey data can inform on monopsony power in a labour market when carefully analysed.
  • No Thumbnail Available
    Item
    Metadata only
  • No Thumbnail Available
    Item
    Metadata only
    Tax(i)ing the poor? Commuting costs in South Africa
    (2017-06-06) Kerr, Andrew
  • No Thumbnail Available
    Item
    Metadata only
    The returns to formality and informality in urban Africa
    (Labour Economics, 2015-05-28) Falco, Paulo; Kerr, Andrew; Rankin, Neil; Sandefur, Justin; Teal, Francis
  • No Thumbnail Available
    Item
    Open Access
    Work in South Africa: Analysis of Workdays, Hours, Schedules and the Timing of Work
    (2023) Budiaki, Grace; Kerr, Andrew
    The concepts of labour supply and work are ultimately about the time people spend doing labour activities. In most developed countries, the rise of the 24-hour and gig economies has altered work structures by replacing traditional nine-to-five jobs and allowing for more flexible working hours (Donovan, Bradley, and Shimabukuru, 2016; Katz and Krueger, 2019; Presser, 1999). While this offers workers a better work-life balance, working non-standard work schedules and times, especially over prolonged periods, can have negative effects on the well-being of workers, families and society (Presser, 2005). However, work schedules and timing patterns are not thoroughly examined in existing labour supply studies, which primarily focus on weekly work hours (Hamermesh, 1996). Thus, this paper examines workers' labour supply in terms of hours per day, days per week and weekly schedules, as well as the instantaneous work times, using data from the 2008-2019 Quarterly Labour Force Surveys (QLFS) and the 2010 Time Use Survey (TUS). Considering that this kind of analysis on labour supply and work timing has been extensively researched in developed countries only, this paper contributes to the literature in the context of South Africa. Through descriptive and regression analysis, this paper seeks to provide a comprehensive view of work patterns, particularly the extent of non-standard work in South Africa. This paper finds that labour supply declined marginally across daily hours, days and weekly hours between 2008 and 2018. Although, the decline in workdays was more pronounced due to fewer people working on weekends. Surprisingly, the number of people working a standard 8-hours and 5-days work schedule increased significantly by 27% during the period, which suggests that work schedules in South Africa are becoming more standardised, in contrast to 24-hour and gig economy trends. Most people (95.8%) work during standard times, but up to 65% work outside those hours, typically in the early mornings and evenings. Work during non-standard times only accounts for 16.6% of the total work time in a day. Overall, the findings of this paper provide limited empirical evidence to suggest considerable changes in work schedules and timing to support the prevalence of the 24-hour and gig economies in South Africa.
  • No Thumbnail Available
    Item
    Open Access
    Worker flows in South Africa from 2008 to 2019: Evidence from matched quarterly labour force survey
    (2023) Pan, Sammy; Kerr, Andrew
    This study examines the extent, cyclicality, and heterogeneity of worker flows for the working-age population of South Africa from 2008 to 2019. Worker flows are measured using quarterly panel data at the individual level, which is constructed by matching individual records between consecutive quarters of the cross-sectional data of the Quarterly Labour Force Survey (QLFS) from 2008q1 to 2019q2. This study expends a significant amount of effort in proposing and implementing a method for evaluating the quality of different matching procedures for the QLFS, which has never been accomplished systematically in previous literature. Using the matched QLFS panel, we find that the average quarterly worker flow rate was 46.26% over the period 2008 – 2019, which is large when compared with other developing countries. This is surprising in a labour market considered by many as rigid. Gross worker flows are procyclical. But its procyclicality is driven by the procyclical worker flows in the informal sector. In contrast, worker flows in the formal sector are acyclical. There is substantial heterogeneity in worker flows across different firms, jobs, industries, and sub-population groups. A series of descriptive analyses, complemented by a regression analysis of separation probabilities, reveal that worker flows are much larger for some groups (e.g., those who are younger or have lower levels of education), firms (e.g., those that are smaller in size or private), jobs (e.g., those with fixed-term contract relative to permanent contract), or industries (e.g., construction, agriculture, and domestic services) when compared to the rest. Therefore, although substantial gross worker flows in South Africa imply that the labour market as a whole is not as rigid as most people think, certain sub-sections of the labour market are definitely more rigid than others. Despite a myriad of data challenges and obstacles, we believe that this study has managed to capture the true extent and pattern of worker flows in South Africa. Measurement errors may exist in our estimates, but a robustness check shows a high degree of consistency between our worker flow estimates and those in the past literature, implying that measurement errors are moderate.