Category Archives: Jobs, Finance and Skills

Financial Literacy and Parenting in South Africa

By Janina Steinert – University of Oxford. Living in poverty is not only a shortfall of money but also a daily struggle for securing food and basic needs.  The “one dollar a day” analogy is delusive in that the dollar … Continue reading

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Households and networks: Will your friend’s job search get you a job? Does land title registration work?

More fresh papers from the CSAE Conference! Elwyn Davies, Viviana Perego, Emma Riley and Marc Witte give an overview of a selection papers on networks, households and gender. Are there spillovers from your friend’s job search? Does the language you speak matter … Continue reading

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Labour at #OxCSAE2017: The value of reference letters and should we now use FitBits to measure productivity?

Labour is traditionally a popular topic at the CSAE Conference. This year’s conference had a total of six sessions on Labour, with 24 papers presented. Over the next days our team of PhD bloggers will present you with a selection … Continue reading

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Should policy seek to promote small firms or large ones in Africa?

Is small beautiful when it comes to firms in poor countries? Whatever one thinks is the answer to that question the pervasiveness of small scale enterprises in countries in sub-Saharan Africa is not in dispute. In a recent CSAE discussion … Continue reading

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Why self-employed women earn less: Building a search-match model with data from Ghana

In many African labour markets, women are over-represented in sectors where earnings gaps are largest. For example, in urban Ghana, self-employed women outnumber self-employed men by a ratio of nearly 3:1, but male earnings are double female earnings in that … Continue reading

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How useful is education in Africa?

Travelling around any poor country in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) the visitor is struck by how far schools outnumber factories. The large number of schools is due partly to the success of one of the MDGs which is that primary education … Continue reading

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A new way of measuring the different benefits of going to school

Designing effective schooling policies requires understanding what motivates school enrolment decisions. This partly explains why so many empirical studies have attempted to measure the wage benefits that individuals receive from an additional year of schooling (or the rate of return … Continue reading

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Networks, gender and job referrals in Malawi

A CSAE enumerator at work in Ghana in 2008. But how did she find the job? And what would she say if we asked her to refer someone to fill a similar position? Referrals matter  “Another issue concerns your letters … Continue reading

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Africans care about jobs; non-Africans care about institutions?

There’s a lot of chatter in the blogosphere about Westerners’ perceptions of Africa, and how poorly they align with Africans’ own views of the challenges their societies face. This week I’m in Oxford, for the annual conference on “Economic Development … Continue reading

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NREGA and rural welfare in India

  In the evaluation of social programs, the first order concern is their effect on beneficiaries. However, there is a growing awareness about “spillovers” or “peer effects”, which could affect non-beneficiaries. In Mexican villages where PROGRESA cash transfers were implemented, … Continue reading

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