Browsing by Author "Keswell, Malcolm"

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    Accents, Race and Discrimination: Evidence from a Trust Game
    (2017-06-06) Yagman, Ece; Keswell, Malcolm
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    Altruism and the role of affect: an investigation into the causal effects of positive emotions and its rationality on altruism
    (2021) Kinyanjui, George Kariuki; Keswell, Malcolm
    There is now well established evidence that shows that growing up in poor neighbourhoods can keep people locked in poverty. One response to neighbourhood distress – i.e., situations in which neighbourhoods serves as poverty traps – is to move people out of such situations. Experiments conducted in the United States of America (for example, the Moving to Opportunity experiment) provides a compelling case for this approach. However, when the scale of neighbourhood distress reaches a majority of the population, as is does in South Africa, where the legacy of Apartheid spatial inequality persists, alternative approaches are necessary. One such alternative is to seek to better understand the behavioural mechanisms at work that tilt communities toward the low level equilibria characterising a poverty trap and to target those behaviours that can aggregate to produce neighbourhood distress. Behaviour modification programmes attempt to do this, for example, by targeting the underlying drivers of crime, violence, risky sexual behaviour and fatalism that characterises so many marginalised communities in South Africa. This dissertation uses data from a rare lab-in-the-field experiment to investigate one important mechanism of behaviour modification: the impact of emotions on pro-social preferences. The results show that positive emotions causes an increase in individual altruism and do not imply irrationality according to standard axiomatic frameworks in economics. This contrasts with the view of earlier investigators that emotions are disruptive in decision making. This dissertation is divided into five chapters. Chapter one focuses on a general introduction of endogenous preferences, the link between emotions, pro-social preferences and decision making. In chapter two I discuss the novel behaviour modification experiment that this dissertation is based on: the Activate! Change Driver's programme (hereafter, simply referred to as Activate!), an empowerment programme aimed at youth that live in distressed neighbourhoods in South Africa. Activate! consists of a nexus of interventions that aims to promote prosocial preferences (i.e., preferences for altruism, trust, and commitment to the public good), as well as interventions that are aimed at changing mindsets and perceptions that foster destructive risk-taking, myopia and civic apathy. The programme runs as a series of three modularised workshops covering self-belief, goal-orientation, creative thinking, problem solving, resilience, communication skills, trust building, project management, and political engagement. These interventions are theorised to lead to an actualisation of greater pro-social preferences as well as better outcomes in terms of risk taking, tolerance for delayed gratification, civic engagement, and economic opportunity. In chapter three, I investigate the causal effect of positive affect on altruism. I employed two estimation strategies where in the first strategy, I used an instrumental variable approach to estimate the effects of affect on altruism. In the second strategy, I relaxed the assumption that affect does not directly impact altruism by using a mood inducement experiment to vary affect within the subjects. Both identification strategies support the same conclusion: positive affect is shown to be a significant and positive cause of altruism. Subjects in the positive affect treatment send significantly more tokens to anonymous others in a dictator game as compared to subjects in the mild neutral affect treatment. This result is robust in all specifications considered. Chapter four focuses on characterising whether emotions disrupt rational choices in altruism. In psychology, emotions are theorised to influence decision making since they influence a person's decision to exert effort and be productive at work. There is also evidence indicating that emotions reduce time preferences over money, that they can increase cognitive flexibility, reduce spending and willingness to pay as well as increase reciprocity in gift exchange. I made use of data from a modified dictator game experiment and employed the axioms of revealed preferences to test for economic rationality. I found that subjects treated to positive affect elicited altruistic preferences that are indifferent to subjects treated to neutral affect and that their preferences fit the standard economic definition of rationality. Thus, by this account even though emotions are seen to be disruptive, they do not imply irrationality. In summary, the dissertation presents a number of implications. First, behaviour modification programmes especially in the context of marginalised communities may result in increasing pro-social outcomes and therefore have the potential to reverse fatalistic preferences among young people. Second, behaviour modification and ultimately belief updating towards pro-social preferences has the potential to spark civic mindedness among young people. Third, positive emotions mediate pro-sociality and do not blur individual rationality in decision making.
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    Behavioural preferences and labour market attachment among South African youth
    (2025) Goddard, Ianthe; Keswell, Malcolm; Bhorat, Haroon
    Youth unemployment in South Africa remains a persistent and multifaceted challenge. This study explores how behavioural preferences—specifically risk aversion and probability weighting—vary across employment categories among South African youth. Using structural estimates from incentivised Multiple Price List (MPL) tasks, we estimate parameters for relative risk aversion (r) and probability sensitivity (γ) and examine how these relate descriptively to wage employment, self-employment, and unemployment. Our findings suggest that employed females exhibit higher levels of risk aversion, consistent with a preference for stable income under constrained structural conditions. Unemployed individuals, particularly those exhibiting back-switching behaviour in MPL tasks, display more curved or non-linear probability weighting. We interpret lower γ values not as psychological pessimism or irrationality, but as reduced sensitivity to probability - potentially a bounded rationality response to uncertainty and limited feedback. We do not infer causality, but highlight how behavioural regularities correlate with labour market status in a high-uncertainty, developing-country context. Our results contribute to the behavioural economics literature by extending models of bounded rationality to explain labour market disengagement. The findings offer preliminary policy insight into how informational environments and employment support structures could be designed to improve labour market participation among youth
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    Educational inheritance and the distribution of occupations: Evidence from South Africa
    (Review of Income and Wealth, 2015-05-28) Keswell, Malcolm; Girdwood, Sarah; Leibbrandt, Murray
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    Educational inheritance and the distribution of occupations: Evidence from South Africa
    (Southern Africa Labour and Development Research Unit, 2015-05-28) Keswell, Malcolm; Girdwood, Sarah; Leibbrandt, Murray
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    Employment, group membership and risk-pooling behaviour: field evidence from South Africa
    (2003) Keswell, Malcolm
    This paper analyses the joint determination of social network membership and employment status in stochastic environments, using data from a new survey undertaken in KwaZulu Natal province as well as ethnographic evidence. The results show strong links between membership of social networks and employment. In particular, being a member of a ROSCA or community-based burial society smooths positive as well as negative shocks both intertemporally as well as across individual members. The results also show that having access to a stable income source such as a social pension enhances the employment probabilities of individuals who reside in households recently sujected to health shocks. Where access to such nonstochastic income is rare, membership of ROSCAs and community based burial societies is common.
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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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    Gender and Resource Allocation Decisions in Farm Households: Evidence from a South African Land Reform Programme
    (2019) Fitzhenry, Nicholas; Keswell, Malcolm
    I study whether South African farm households participating in a land reform program make Pareto efficient intrahousehold consumption decisions. Using evaluation survey data of beneficiary households participating in South Africa’s Land Redistribution for Agricultural Development (LRAD) program, I estimate and test the unitary and collective models of intrahousehold resource allocation. By estimating the households’ demand function’s responses to the size of land grant transfers going to resident men and women, I find evidence rejecting the income pooling hypothesis of the unitary model. On the other hand, I cannot reject the hypothesis that resource allocation is Pareto efficient, satisfying the test of the collective model. An alternative test of the collective model using the z-conditional demand approach proposed by Bourguignon, Browning and Chiappori (2009) also favours Pareto efficiency.
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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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    How important is education for getting ahead in South Africa?
    (2002) Keswell, Malcolm; Poswell, Laura
    The impact of education on the process of development relies crucially on what can be assumed about the way it is rewarded. Standard human capital theory assumes diminishing marginal returns to education. The purpose of this paper is to examine the empirical relevance of this assumption. We find that the standard approach to estimating this relation is not well supported by virtually all of the available evidence for South Africa. Indeed, the marginal rate of return to education is extremely high for tertiary levels of education and small (approaching zero) for lower levels of education. If human capital accumulation is an important determinant of wealth accumulation, this implies that educational reforms in the form of small policy interventions will not have any significant impact on the distribution of income and wealth, as long as key features of labour markets that govern the manner in which education is rewarded, remains unaltered.
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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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    Learning to trust : experimental evidence of social learning in a real-world social network of player A's in a trust game.
    (2013) Roots, Lindsey; Keswell, Malcolm
    Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references.
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    Mental health and social decision making: How depression alters the way we trust
    (2019) Spazzoli, Rowan; Keswell, Malcolm
    Depression is one of the most prevalent causes of disease burden in the world, with a particularly high prevalence in South Africa. Significant evidence exists for how depression affects employment, income and education, but there is little research on how it affects social decision making. This dissertation addresses the direct impact of depression on the prosocial behaviours that influence economic outcomes, specifically trust and trustworthiness, rather than the economic outcomes themselves. Using experimental and survey data from a randomised control trial, I show that depression reduces trust but, counter-intuitively, increases the trustworthiness of individuals. Additionally, I show that the Activate! programme reduces depression in men and increases trust in all participants. These results have significant implications for how we consider depression in economics, particularly on how it affects poverty by influencing prosocial.
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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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    Risk attitudes and affective states among young adults
    (2025) Raziya, Anzisca; Keswell, Malcolm
    This study examines how negative emotions influence risk attitudes and chance attitudes profiles among young adults using data from a novel behaviour modification programme targeted at young adults in South Africa. Risk attitudes are estimated structurally by assuming a stan-dard power utility function for the risky prospects they face in the risk elicitation experiment. The power parameter is recovered, and checks are performed for evidence of risk aversion and probability distortions. We find that while both the control and treatment groups exhibit risk aversion, the programme does not significantly alter risk aversion overall. However, significant treatment effects emerge with respect to probability distortion, suggesting that the programme fosters behaviour more closely aligned with expected utility maximisation. The programme appears to decrease the likelihood that individuals never experience anger or hostility. However, the effects on anger and hostility do not account for the observed treatment effects on probability distortions. Furthermore, individuals who never experience nervousness tend towards risk neutrality, while those who experience it are typically risk averse. Interestingly, both nervousness and fear correlate negatively with probability distortions, indicating a more pessimistic approach to risk among those who do not experience these emotions. This pattern holds across both the treatment and control groups, suggesting that these emotions remain relatively stable in the programme context. These findings emphasise the importance of considering affective states in designing interventions to address risky behaviours among young adults, contributing to improved public health outcomes.
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    Shocks, Assets and Credit
    (2017-06-06) Keswell, Malcolm; Burns, Justine
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    Social assistance, gender and the aged in South Africa
    (Taylor & Francis, 2005) Burns, Justine; Keswell, Malcolm; Leibbrandt, Murray
    This paper reviews the history of the noncontributory social pension in South Africa, as well as recent work on the distributional and poverty-alleviating effects of this program. The pension has a strong gender dimension, reaching three times as many women as men, and has an unambiguous impact on reducing household poverty, particularly among Black South African households. The existing literature also suggests that the pension reaches unintended beneficiaries within households and that strongly gender-differentiated patterns emerge both in the sharing of pension incomes by pensioners and in the behavioral responses of other household members to pension receipt.