Identfying Pure-Income Effects in an Empirical Model of Labour Supply: the case of the South African Social Pension

This paper investigates the income effects of the South African Social Pension. Using data from three waves of the the Labour Force Survey, we find that there appears to be a significant negative association between labour supply and pension receipt. However, we find little evidence to support the view that these results can be interpreted as pure income effects. Rather, the evidence suggests that the association is driven by age-cohort effects, which we argue reflects the burden of living with the elderly. We also report preliminary evidence which is suggestive of endogenous household formation in response to eligibility for the social pension.public transfers, pensions, labour supply

Evaluating the Impact of Health Programmes

This paper has two broad objectives. The first objective is broadly methodological and deals with some of the more pertinent estimation issues one should be aware of when studying the impact of health status on economic outcomes. We discuss some alternatives for constructing counterfactuals when designing health program evaluations such as randomization, matching and instrumental variables. Our second objective is to present a review of the existing evidence on the impact of health interventions on individual welfare.