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

Simon Franklin

No 2015-10, CSAE Working Paper Series from Centre for the Study of African Economies, University of Oxford

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.

Date: 2015
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-afr, nep-dev and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Downloads: (external link)
https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:a59e09ad-62b8-42e6-b7fb-4d2c7e85502b (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 (2016)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:csa:wpaper:2015-10

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CSAE Working Paper Series from Centre for the Study of African Economies, University of Oxford Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Julia Coffey ().