Completed research
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Working paper
Inequality has been rising in most countries for several decades, with negative consequences for social cohesion and economic growth. Substantial gender wage gaps contribute significantly to overall wage inequality. We look at an often-overlooked driver...
August 2020
Labour market and inequality
Working paper
Attempts to regulate the temporary employment sector have had mixed results internationally. In South Africa, temporary employment was regulated in 2015 through amendments to the Labour Relations Act. This paper uses administrative data to examine...
June 2020
Enterprise development
Working paper
The author applies the bunching methodology to South African administrative tax data over the period from 2011 to 2017 to investigate the responsiveness of individual taxpayers to changes in marginal personal income tax rates. She...
June 2020
Public revenue
Working paper
The IRP5 and IT3(a) tax data from the South African Revenue Service have been made available to researchers through a joint project between the South African Revenue Service, the National Treasury, and UNU-WIDER. In this...
May 2020
Labour market and inequality
Working paper
The principal contribution of this paper is to investigate the relationship between policy uncertainty, caused by recent developments in international markets, and firms’ trade margins for the largest economy in Africa: South Africa. In particular...
May 2020
Phase 1 regional growth
Working paper
The purpose of this research is to investigate whether transport accessibility influences the employment duration of individuals in South Africa. The South African Revenue Service’s IRP5 administration datasets, which indicate employment duration and spatial location...
May 2020
Labour market and inequality
Working paper
The Employment Equity Act No. 55 of 1998 was introduced by the South African government to address the legacy of apartheid and ensure equitable representation of black people and women in the South African labour...
April 2020
Labour market and inequality
Working paper
This paper presents new evidence on the employment effects of a large increase in agricultural minimum wages in South Africa using anonymized tax data. We add to the minimum wage literature by differentiating employment effects...
April 2020
Labour market and inequality
Working paper
Nowadays, tax depreciation allowances are used less as instruments of macroeconomic stabilization and more as long-term measures to stimulate investment. This paper tabulates the types of accelerated depreciation allowances in South Africa and calculates the...
April 2020
Public revenue
Working paper
This paper estimates the distribution of personal wealth in South Africa by combining tax microdata, household surveys, and macroeconomic balance sheet statistics. We systematically compare estimates of the wealth distribution obtained by direct measurement of...
April 2020
Labour market and inequality
Working paper
A key objective of many governments is to improve tax revenue mobilization. One way to achieve this is by improving tax compliance. This requires accurate knowledge of the tax gap, i.e. the difference between what...
April 2020
Public revenue
Working paper
We study the relationship between product market competition and labour market outcomes in South Africa. We combine firm-level data from tax records with individual-level data from the labour force survey. We estimate markups across sectors...
March 2020
Labour market and inequality
Working paper
The recent National Health Insurance White Paper proposes redirection of medical tax credits revenue towards the financing of the national health insurance. This raises critical questions about the impact on affordability for the poor as...
March 2020
Public revenue
Working paper
The elasticity of taxable income is a key tax policy parameter that plays an important role in the formulation of tax and transfer policy. This paper extends work by Kemp (2019) by using a new...
March 2020
Public revenue
Working paper
Few studies exist on job duration in developing labour markets—an important omission both in our understanding of such markets and for the job duration literature, which is mainly based on developed-country case studies, which differ...
March 2020
Labour market and inequality
Working paper
Countries’ economic complexity, and the associated diversification and sophistication of their exports, is a key determinant of economic growth. Understanding how South African firms learn to export more sophisticated products is, therefore, an important policy...
February 2020
Enterprise development