Impact of South Africa's older persons' grant on the labour market outcome of prime age individuals

The study evaluates the impact of the presence of an individual who is age eligible for "state older persons' grant" on the labour force participation of prime age individuals who live with these individuals. Exploiting the panel structure of the National Income Dynamic Study (NIDS) data set, the study uses all three waves (2008, 2010 and 2012) of the data set to estimate if whether or not a causal relationship exists between the probability of employment of these prime age individuals and the existence of an individual eligible for pension in the household. Apart from employing cross sectional methods, the study makes use of pooled OLS and an Individual Fixed Effect model to estimate different equation specifications which control for various factors. To facilitate better comparison with previous literature, certain regression specifications in both the cross section and Panel evaluation methods restricts the sample to households with at least three generations of individuals residing within the household unit. Consistent with previous research, cross sectional results show that holding other factors that affect the probability of employment constant, there exists a negative association between the existence of age eligible individuals in households with prime aged adults, and the probability that these adults are employed. Contrary to previous research however, the panel results uphold instead of contradicting the results from cross sectional analysis and hence suggest that there indeed exists a negative causal relationship between the existence of at least one pension eligible individual and the probability that prime age adults living with them are employed. The results also find that consistent with previous research, the males in the household are the major drivers of this effect.

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

School of Economics

Year dc:date.issued

2014

Author dc:creator

• Idahosa, Love Odion

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Woolard, Ingrid

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/11427/8514

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:open.uct.ac.za:11427/8514