Enabled to Work: The Impact of Government Housing on Slum Dwellers in South Africa

Simon Franklin

SERC Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Performance, LSE

Abstract: This paper looks at the link between housing conditions and household income and labour market participation in South Africa. I use four waves of panel data from 2002-2009 on households that were originally living in informal dwellings. I find that those households that received free government housing later experienced large increases in their incomes. This effect is driven by increased employment rates among female members of these households, rather than other sources of income. I take advantage of a natural experiment created by a policy of allocating housing to households that lived in close proximity to new housing developments. Using rich spatial data on the roll out of government housing projects, I generate geographic instruments to predict selection into receiving housing. I then use housing projects that were planned and approved but never actually built to allay concerns about non-random placement of housing projects. The fixed effects results are robust to the use of these instruments and placebo tests. I present suggestive evidence that formal housing alleviates the demands of work at home for women, which leads to increases in labour supply to wage paying jobs.

Keywords: housing; labour supply; time allocation; home production (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D13 J22 O18 P14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-pr~, nep-lma and nep-ure
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http://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/sercdp0197.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Enabled to work: The impact of government housing on slum dwellers in South Africa (2020)
Working Paper: Enabled to work: the impact of government housing on slum dwellers in South Africa (2016)
Working Paper: Enabled to Work: The Impact of Government Housing on Slum Dwellers in South Africa (2015)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cep:sercdp:0197

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