Browsing by Author "Piraino, Patrizio"

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    An analysis of the relationship between health and the labour market in South Africa
    (2015) Nwosu, Chijioke Osinachi; Woolard, Ingrid; Piraino, Patrizio
    The relationship between health and labour market outcomes is of academic and policy interest due to the essential role the labour market plays in engendering economic growth. It is in this regard that this thesis is both timely and essential especially in light of scant literature on the health-labour market relationship in South Africa. South Africa presents an interesting case for a study of this nature as it had experienced high disease burden and mortality, coupled with declining labour force participation in the period prior to this study. Furthermore, the relationship between health and labour market earnings as well as impairment-related wage discrimination is not well-known in South Africa. Therefore, this thesis sought to establish the relationship between health on the one hand, and labour force participation, wage determination and wage discrimination on the other, in South Africa. Data was obtained from the first and third waves of the National Income Dynamics Study (collected in 2008 and 2012 respectively), a rich and nationally representative survey dataset of South African households. Descriptive analysis and different econometric techniques like instrumental variables, censored quantile regression and Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition were used for estimation. For the cross-sectional analysis, the study found significant impact of health on labour force participation of between 20% and 33% depending on the measure, while longer term relationships indicated statistically significant association (up to 11% for females and 16% for males). These figures indicate that the relationship between health and labour force participation was not just temporary. Males had higher labour force participation probability than females. Furthermore, grant receipt was associated with reduced labour force participation probability while education and age were associated with increased labour force participation. Also, marriage/cohabitation was negatively (positively) associated with female (male) labour force participation. In addition, labour force participation probability was generally higher in other areas relative to traditional authority locations. These results conform to a priori expectations. On the relationship (or gradient) between health and wages, the study established positive and statistically significant gradients between better physical, psychological and general health on the one hand, and wages on the other, among Africans and coloureds. This was even after controlling for education and other important wage determinants like occupational category, industry, union membership and gender. These gradients ranged from an elasticity of -0.06 to -0.07 for psychological health/depression to an elasticity of 0.31-0.45 for physical health (proxied by body mass index) in the short term. Also, persistently adverse general health and psychological conditions exhibited steep gradients. Finally, the study found evidence of non-trivial impairment-related differences in returns to wage-determining characteristics (loosely termed wage discrimination) in both 2008 and 2012 for the average wage, while the proportion of estimated wage gaps contributed by impairment-related differences in returns increased over time. Similar findings were obtained across the wage distribution, as the proportion of total estimated wage gaps accounted for by returns to characteristics increased across waves in virtually all deciles of the wage distribution. Even in terms of magnitude, the returns/discrimination component of total estimated impairment-related wage gaps increased for most quantiles of the wage distribution. Finally, education and occupational class contributed the most to the explained wage gap across waves.
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    The effect of remittances on household income inequality in South Africa
    (2014) Hundenborn, Janina; Piraino, Patrizio
    Household incomes in developing countries often rely on a variety of sources. Analyzing the effects on income inequality of these different sources can help understand developments underlying overall inequality. South Africa’s levels of inequality have been characterized as remaining “stubbornly high”(Leibbrandt and Finn, 2012). Studies show that in the past 20 years, Gini coefficients of per capita income have increased from 0.66 in 1993 to 0.70 in 2008. Lerman and Yitzhaki (1985) derived a method to decompose inequality of income by source followed by a derivation of the Gini Coefficient by Stark et al. (1986). It therefore becomes possible to assess the impact of changes in different components on inequality of total household income. This paper utilizes these techniques to focus on the effect of remittances on inequality in South Africa. Applying the decomposition of income sources to the South African National Income and Dynamics Survey (NIDS), the paper will take the analysis one step further by constructing a counterfactual that allows to compare current inequality levels to levels that would have prevailed had migration not taken place. For the construction of this counterfactual, conditional difference in difference matching will be employed and data on matched non-remittance households will be used to predict household incomes excluding remittances for migration households. The findings of this paper show that levels of inequality are still stagnating. While inequality measured by the Gini coefficient is lacking significant improvement, the counterfactual analysis shows that without remittances, inequality would be slightly worse than current levels. The counterfactual estimation thus supports the result of the decomposition of the Gini coefficient that also finds a minor inequality reducing effect of remittances.
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    Essays in economics of education: free primary education, birth order and human capital development in Lesotho
    (2015) Moshoeshoe, Ramaele Elias; Ardington, Cally; Piraino, Patrizio
    Given the low levels of educational standards in the developing world, the World Education Forum adopted the Dakar Framework for Action (DFA) in 2000, calling for quality 'Education for All' children of school-going age. Heeding to this call, many sub-Saharan African countries instituted Free Primary Education (FPE) policies. Lesotho instituted the FPE programme in 2000 on a grade-by-grade basis; first abolishing school fees in grade one, and then in successive higher grades each following year. This thesis consists of a short introductory chapter, three self-contained analytical chapters which empirically evaluate the importance of the FPE policy and family factors on education in Lesotho, and the summary chapter. It first examines the effect of the FPE policy on primary school enrolment in Chapter 2 using household level data for before and after the policy. A difference-in-differences strategy is employed to tease out the FPE effect. This exploits the variations in enrolment rates over time and across grade-groups (i.e. grades covered versus those not-yet covered) created by the implementation strategy of the programme. The findings demonstrate that the policy significantly increased enrolment of primary school-age children by at least 9.3 percentage points (or 13.2 percent). There is also evidence that this policy disproportionately raised enrolment levels of children from poor households and that of boys (the historically disadvantaged group), thereby bridging the gender- and wealth-related educational (enrolment) inequalities. In Chapter 3, the thesis draws on grade six pupils' standardised maths and (English) reading test scores from 2000 and 2007 to analyse changes in educational achievement and educational inequality, and the determinants of such changes. The analysis of the data shows that educational achievement increased significantly for both low- and high-ability pupils over the period of analysis. Nonetheless, this increase in achievement was accompanied by a significant rise in educational inequality, especially in reading test scores. The analysis further shows that these changes are statistically related to policy measures taken under the FPE programme. In particular, the results show that pupil-teacher ratio is negatively correlated with changes in reading performance of low-ability pupils, while teacher effort (i.e. subject-testing frequency and teaching hours per week) and grade repetition have a positive influence on changes in educational achievement. These results suggest that the fall in pupil teacher ratio between 2000 and 2007 has helped increase educational achievement. The analysis, however, reveals that much of the increase in educational achievement and educational inequality is unexplained by both school and pupils' family characteristics, which suggests that there could be other unobserved family and school factors that influence achievement and inequality. Therefore, in Chapter 4 of the thesis I shift focus from FPE policy effects and look at the impact of family factors on human capital accumulation. Specifically, Chapter 4 examines the effect of a child's order of birth on human capital development (i.e. enrolment, educational attainment, and schooling progression) using family-fixed effects models. Birth order has received much attention in the economics and psychology literature. Contrary to much of the evidence from developing countries, I find that birth order has a strong negative effect on human capital development. These birth order effects are pronounced in large families, and families with first-born girls, thereby revealing the strong girls' education preferences in Lesotho. Turning to potential pathways of these effects, I find that birth order effects are not propagated through family wealth, but mainly though birth- (or child-) spacing. These results suggest that there are some intra-household inefficiencies that could explain the changes in educational achievement and inequality.
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    Essays on child labour and schooling in Ghana
    (2018) Ayifah, Rebecca Nana Yaa; Piraino, Patrizio
    This thesis consists of three papers on child labour and schooling in Ghana. The first paper examines the correlates of child labour and schooling, as well as the trade-off between work and schooling of children aged 5-17 years with the 2013 Ghana Living Standard Survey data. A bivariate probit model is used since the decisions to participate in schooling and in the labour market are interdependent. The results show that there is a gender gap both in child work and schooling. In particular, boys are less likely to work (and more likely to be enrolled in schools) relative to girls. Whereas parent education, household wealth and income of the family are negatively correlated with child work, these factors influence schooling positively. In addition, parents‟ employment status, ownership of livestock, distance to school, child wage and schooling expenditure increase the probability of child labour and reduce the likelihood of school enrolment. In terms of the relationship between child labour and schooling, the results show that an additional hour of child labour is associated with 0.15 hour (9 minutes) reduction in daily hours of school attendance; and the effect is bigger for girls relative to boys. Also, one more hour of child labour is associated with an increase in the probability of a child falling behind in grade progression by 1.4 percentage points. The second paper estimates the impact of Ghana’s Livelihood Empowerment Against Poverty (LEAP) cash transfer programme on schooling outcomes (enrolment, attendance hours, repetition and test scores) and child labour in farming and non-farm enterprises. Using longitudinal data, the paper employs three different quasi-experimental methods (propensity score matching, difference-in-difference, and difference-in-difference combined with matching). Overall, the results show that the LEAP programme had no effect on school enrolment and test scores, but it increased the weekly hours of class attendance by 5.2 hours and reduced repetition rate by 11 percentage points for children in households that benefited from the programme. In addition, there was heterogeneity in these impacts, with boys benefiting more relative to girls. In terms of child labour, the results show that the programme had no effect on the extensive margin of child labour in farming and non-farm enterprises. However, the LEAP programme reduced the intensity of farm work done by children by as much as 2.6 hours per day. The largest impact of the programme, in terms of iii reduction in the intensity of child labour in farming, occurred in female-headed and extremely poor households. The last paper investigates the impact of mothers‟ autonomy or bargaining power in the household on their children’s schooling and child labour in Ghana. The paper uses a noneconomic measure of women’[s autonomy, which is an index constructed from five questions on power relations between men and women. The paper employs both an Ordinary Least Square (OLS) and an Instrumental Variable (IV) approach. Overall, the results suggest that ignoring the endogeneity of mothers‟ autonomy underestimates its true impact on schooling and child labour. They also show that an increase in mothers‟ autonomy increases school enrolment and hours of class attendance, with girls benefiting more than boys. The paper finds a negative relationship between mothers‟ autonomy and both the extensive and intensive margin of child labour. In addition, it demonstrates that improvement in women’s autonomy has bigger impacts on rural children’s welfare relative to urban children.
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    Examining land reform in South Africa: evidence from survey data
    (2017) Ryan, Joanna; Leibbrandt, Murray; Piraino, Patrizio
    Land and land reform have long been contentious and highly charged topics in South Africa, with land performing the dual functions of redress for the past and development for the future. This research explores both these aspects of land, with the focus being on the impact of land receipt on household welfare and food insecurity, and social preferences for fairness and redistribution more generally. One of the main aims is to contribute to the land reform debate by providing previously-lacking quantitative evidence on the aggregate welfare outcomes of land redistribution, as well as the extent of social preferences for redistribution in the land restitution framework. In exploring these issues, the welfare outcomes of land are first explored using the National Income Dynamics Study (NIDS) data and unconditional quantile regression analysis. The focus is then narrowed to the food insecurity impact of land receipt, beginning with a methodological chapter outlining the development of a new food insecurity index applying the Alkire-Foster method of multidimensional poverty measurement (2009; 2011). This is followed by the presentation and discussion of food insecurity profiles of land beneficiary and non-beneficiary households. The new index is also used as an outcome measure in exploring the determinants of household food insecurity. These two sections again use the NIDS data. The final section shifts the emphasis from the economic welfare benefits of land redistribution to notions of fairness and social justice encapsulated by land restitution. A behavioural laboratory experiment is used to investigate social preferences for fairness, and the factors that influence redistributive inclinations, by exploring the relative weights placed on fairness considerations and self-interest, as well as the fairness ideal. The findings indicate that beneficiaries do not use the land received for productive purposes, a possible explanation for the limited economic welfare impacts of land reform that are observed. Despite this limited developmental impact, the laboratory experiment makes it clear that land reform plays an important role in addressing other needs and wants in society, particularly in respect of preferences for fairness and addressing historical injustices.
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    Immigrant earnings growth: Selection bias or real progress?
    (Canadian Journal of Economics, 2015-05-28) Picot, Garnett; Piraino, Patrizio
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    Information, mobilization, and demand for redistribution: A survey experiment in South Africa
    (2015-05-28) Pellicer, Miquel; Piraino, Patrizio; Wegner, Eva
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    Intergenerational persistence of educational status in South Africa
    (2019) Rhodes, Benedict; Piraino, Patrizio
    This paper has used the NIDS dataset to measure the intergenerational mobility of education, over a ten-year period in South Africa. The research considers both father-son and motherdaughter pairs over the last ten years and yields interesting results, displaying a clear increase in educational mobility in terms of the estimated regression and correlation coefficients for both father-son and mother-daughter pairs. However, decomposing this result into educational cohorts, the distribution of the increase in educational mobility is not experienced uniformly, with a more mobile education system predominantly falling on the children of parents with a high school level of education. Children whose parents had no education and those whose parents were educated at a tertiary level experienced increases in the persistence of educational status. These results have serious policy implications as the average level of education has increased, yet these increases have not been experienced equally and are dependent on family background.
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    Measuring inequality of opportunity in South Africa
    (2014) Nyokangi, Evelyne M; Piraino, Patrizio; Leibbrandt, Murray
    This paper examines the effect of circumstances on the opportunities available to individuals in South Africa, by quantifying the degree to which inequalities in labour market outcomes are due to circumstances (unequal opportunities). To do so, two distinct Inequality of Opportunity indices are applied to the first wave of the National Income Dynamic Study (NIDS). The dissimilarity index estimates the opportunities that need to be reallocated, for all economically active South Africans to have equal access to employment in spite of their circumstances. Whereas the inequality of economic opportunity index, estimates the (lower bound) share of total income inequality that can be attributed to differing circumstances. Results from the empirical analyses reveal that circumstances, such as race, gender and parental education, do not contribute significantly to inequalities in accessing employment. This is in contrast to the substantial share of labour market income inequality, found to stem from circumstances. These results suggest that policies aimed at redressing inequities in the labour market, should focus on the channels through which circumstances, especially race and gender impact an individual’s opportunities and thus their ability to acquire labour market income.
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    Persistent reservations in mining?
    (2014) Njeru, Tom Magara; Piraino, Patrizio
    This paper analyses the persistence of colour bar reservations into the present day mining sector. Focusing on the occupations Banksman/Onsetter, Blaster, Engineer, Labourer and Winding Engine Driver, an ordered probit regression is run producing little evidence to support the persistence. A White skill bias is noted and further investigated using Oaxaca decomposition. Observable skill sets such as education, experience, demographics and firm level characteristics are unable to adequately explain the occupational gap between the races. This might suggests some skill based discrimination is still rife, however with various unobservable characteristics the model cannot control for; a causal relationship cannot be confidently concluded.
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    Quantifying balance for casual inference: An information theoretic perspective
    (2018) Oyenubi, Adeola; Wittenberg, Martin; Piraino, Patrizio
    Impact evaluation is concerned with generating evidence of a causal effect of a policy or a treatment. The central question in any impact evaluation is what would have happened to those receiving the intervention had they not received it. Randomized controlled Trials (RCT) are best at answering this question because balance is achieved through randomization. I note that the balance achieved through randomization is in terms of distribution and not only in some moments of the covariates being compared. When RCTs are not feasible the alternative approach is an observational study or a quasi-experiment. Unlike RCT balance checks in observational studies are often limited to comparing the first or first and second moments of the distributions being compared. This distinction between balance in distribution and balance in a few moments (of observables) forms the basis of the questions this thesis attempts to answer. It is argued that various balance measures used to assess balance in the literature capture different aspects of balance. Measures that utilize only the first two moments may be ignoring information that affect bias and robustness of treatment effect estimates. Additionally, it is argued that measures that compare distributions may also differ in their performance depending on the way they quantify the difference between distributions. In this thesis I introduce the entropic distance metric as a measure of balance. Unlike the mean balancing approach, the proposed measure assesses balance by comparing all moments of the distribution of covariates across treatment status. My result suggests that the proposed entropy measure quantifies balance better than the standardized difference in means and the Kolmogorov-Smirnov (KS) statistic. It is shown that when the summarized distribution of covariates in the treatment and the control group are close in terms of the entropic distance, the treatment effect will be les biased and more robust across econometric techniques. After an introduction, the first substantive chapter introduces the theory of the entropic measure as a way to better assess balance. The chapter provides a simple discrete example where the entropic distance measure detects differences (imbalance) in covariate distribution that other measures of balance used in the literature will not pick up. Since the kind of imbalance in this example has consequences for the bias and robustness of treatment effect estimates, I argue that the proposed measure has an important role to play. The second substantive chapter applies the entropic distance measure to the well-studied National Supported Work Demonstration (NSW) Programme. It shows that the entropic distance measure performs well in identifying non-experimental control groups that yield better estimates of the average treatment effect when result from an experiment is taken as the unbiased treatment effect. The last substantive chapter considers the case of the South African Child Support Grant (CSG). In this chapter, the treatment effect of CSG on height-for-age z score is re-estimated using Genetic matching (GenMatch). GenMatch optimized balance by reweighting covariates. This method compares balance in different (weighted) samples iteratively until balance can no longer be improved. Therefore it is important to use a balance measure that can adequately differentiate between different levels of balance under this method. My result show that treatment effect estimates depend on the balance measure used to optimize balance. The result also suggests that using the entropy measure to assess balance leads to stronger effect estimates in terms of the size of the effect.
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    The effect of career guidance in secondary schools on skills development and sustained economic participation: meaningful employment
    (2024) Ntholeng, Mpho Gift; Piraino, Patrizio
    This study addresses the persistent gap between education and workforce needs in South Africa, contributing to structural unemployment. Focusing on the role of career guidance in secondary schools, the research examines its impact on skills development and its potential to bridge workforce skills gaps. The study aligns with Meyer's (2017) definition of structural unemployment and emphasises the need for targeted interventions during the secondary school-to-employment transition. The research explores the subject of “The Effect of Career Guidance in Secondary Schools on Skills Development and Sustained Economic Participation: Meaningful Employment." By analysing students' perceptions against labour market realities, the study aims to shed light on the multifaceted relationship between career guidance, skills development, and sustained economic participation. Using an exploratory sequential research design, the study employs interviews, some statistical analysis, and surveys. Qualitative data explores skills development and career guidance phenomena, while quantitative data provides insights into identified relationships. The integrated data analysis, following Sandelowski's (2000) approach, seeks to contribute new knowledge on the impact of career guidance on skills development and its alignment with labour market requirements. The study's findings confirm the crucial role of early and comprehensive career guidance in shaping students' future prospects. It reveals that students from lower quintile schools often lack exposure to various career options, limiting their ability to align their skills and interests with labour market demands. The absence of adequate career guidance contributes significantly to structural unemployment. The study advocates for proactive career guidance starting from grade 9 and underscores the importance of equipping schools with the necessary resources to provide effective career guidance. Ethical considerations included obtaining written consent and securing ethical clearance. This study not only advances theoretical frameworks but also provides practical insights for policymakers, educators, and practitioners to enhance career guidance programs and address the complex challenges of youth unemployment.
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    The transmission of longevity across generations: The case of the settler Cape Colony
    (Southern Africa Labour and Development Research Unit, 2015-05-28) Piraino, Patrizio; Muller, Sean; Cilliers, Jeanne; Fourie, Johan
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    The transmission of longevity across generations: The case of the settler Cape colony
    (Research on Social Stratification and Mobility, 2015-05-28) Piraino, Patrizio; Muller, Sean; Cilliers, Jeane; Fourie, Johan