Stellenbosch students win ESSA Founders' Medals

Two students in the Department have won Economic Society of South Africa (ESSA) Founders' Medals this year. ESSA awards these prizes each year for the best thesis in South Africa in four categories (honours, short masters, long masters and doctoral).

Derek Yu has been a researcher and doctoral student at the department, and is currently a lecturer at the University of the Western Cape. His doctoral thesis is entitled Using household surveys for deriving labour market, poverty and inequality trends in South Africa and was completed under the supervision of Servaas van der Berg. The thesis is a thorough investigation of a large number of household surveys conducted in South Africa since the democratic transition in 1994, with a specific focus on methodology, data quality issues and comparability between different surveys. The thesis points out the dangers of naive comparisons across surveys and develops procedures for achieving comparability and addressing other data problems. The work is expected to be useful to many other researchers and to improve the quality of survey data research in South Africa generally.

The prize in the category for Master’s dissertation in full fulfillment of the degree was won by [protected email address] . Her thesis is entitled Cape Colony marriage in perspective and investigates a new data set of genealogical records to track ancestry and marriage patterns of colonial settlers in South Africa. It examines whether the notion of a European Mariage Pattern (EMP) (due to J. Hajnal, 1965) characterises the marriage patterns that emerged in the Cape Colony in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, as well as the potential causes for these patterns. Her supervisor was Johan Fourie.