"The Martha Effect" and other recent working papers

A recent working paper by Drs Nic Spaull and Hendrik van Broekhuizen from the Research Group on Socio-Economic Policy (ReSEP) in SU's Department of Economics presents the interesting finding that in South Africa, girls generally do better than boys at school and at university in almost all fields of study. A good summary of these results and more information can be found in this article on the University's main news webpage.

Many more papers have recently been added to our working paper series. It is well known that old-age pensions provided by the state have an extended impact beyond merely providing for the needs of the retired recipients themselves. A paper by Chloé van Biljon looks at the effects of old-age pensions on children, finding some evidence of a gender bias, i.e. grants paid to female favour girls and similar for males and boys. There are also important implications for bargaining power and decisionmaking power, paticularly of women, in households.

In a different research area, Chris Garbers and Guangling Liu revisits the issue of capital controls, using an asymmetric two country model subject to negative foreign interest rate shocks. Different effects for inflow and outflow controls are identified: outflow controls can provide shock attentuation benefits while inflow controls can amplify shocks, pointing to the relative desirability of outflow controls.