Research
My research interests are in environmental pressure, the labour market, and migration. The connecting question is on distribution. When an economy is hit by a shock such as a drought, a power crisis, or a policy change, who bears the cost, and why them?
Answering this well requires data that can follow people and places over time. Hence my work is built on administrative data, complemented by household surveys and geospatial data.
Environmental economics
Climate is one of the factors slowing development and in some instances reversing the developmental gains. It is a present constraint on production and employment, and is worse on developing countries since they are least resourced to adapt or have resilient economies. I study how environmental stress moves through an economy and where it finally lands.
The strands I work on:
- Climate stress and the labour market. How environmental shocks reach workers through the firms that employ them, and which groups of workers carry the adjustment.
- Weather variability and agriculture. How rainfall and drought conditions affect smallholder production and food security, and whether diversification across crops offers a workable adaptation channel. This work uses household survey microdata linked to geospatial climate indices.
- Energy disruption and economic responses. A project I support.
Jobs and inequality
Earnings dispersion is often described in terms of workers’ schooling, experience and skills. However, a large part of it is actually about employers: which firm one works for, and whether one can change employers easily. If pay gaps are largely about where people work rather than what they can do, then job quality, firm dynamism and labour market mobility become the important levers, and not just training.
My work here focuses on how job quality is distributed across employers, how mobility between firms shapes earnings over a career, and what happens to that mobility when an economy experiences shocks.
Migration
Migration runs through both of the themes above.
- Migrants in the labour market. How migrants access employers, earnings, and the ability to change jobs, and what happens when policies change.
- Displacement. How climate stress and conflict interact to drive forced migration across borders.
Methods and data
- Matched employer–employee data
- Causal inference
- Natural experiments
- Decomposition methods
- Panel econometrics
- Tax-benefit microsimulation
- Geospatial linkage
- Reproducible pipelines
Alongside my own research I build and maintain the cleaning datasets.
I work primarily in Stata, Excel, R, Python and SQL.
Current work
My doctoral research at the University of Pretoria is a three-paper dissertation on employers, mobility and earnings in the South African labour market, using the matched employer–employee tax panel held by the South African Revenue Service and National Treasury. This work also contributes to research at UNU-WIDER on climate and the labour market, industrial policy, and firm responses to electricity rationing.
Individual papers are not listed here while they are in progress. If you would like to discuss the work or read a draft, please get in touch.