Electronic Theses and Dissertations (Masters)

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Browsing Electronic Theses and Dissertations (Masters) by Author "Casale, Daniela"

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    A gendered analysis of labour market outcomes in South Africa during Covid-19: Evidence from the Quarterly Labour Force Survey
    (University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2023-06-22) Selman, Cheryl-Lyn; Casale, Daniela
    The global financial crisis of 2008-2009 disproportionately affected men’s employment. As has been the case in previous economic slumps, industries like manufacturing which predominantly employed men, experienced deeper declines (Mosomi et al 2020). However, soon after the Covid-19 pandemic started spreading globally, early predictions were that women would be hit harder by the Covid-19 crisis than men, because of the kinds of sectors (i.e. industries) and jobs (i.e. less secure, part-time, not UIF registered etc.) in which women dominated (Alon et al 2020; Dingel and Neiman 2020; Joyce and Xu 2020, Mongey and Weinberg 2020; Mosomi et al 2020), and also because of their role in childcare. Growing empirical research suggested this was indeed the case. In addition, women’s employment was slower to recover than men’s as economies reopened (Mosomi et al 2020, Casale and Shepherd 2021), and pre-Covid inequalities had worsened (Casale and Shepherd 2021). The gender gap persisted, even once occupation fixed effects and the proportion of work-from-home tasks as well as education had been used to account for individual differences in workforces in the UK and US (Adams- Prassl et al 2020).
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    Perceived returns to mathematics and student achievement: the South African case
    (University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2023) Gamieldien, Mohamed Faarez; Casale, Daniela
    This study investigates the relationship between students’ perceived returns to mathematics – the future benefits a student believes they will obtain from studying mathematics – and mathematics achievement in South Africa. The study expands the scarce literature on the role of non-cognitive skills (and specifically extrinsic motivation) in education in South Africa. The 2019 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) South Africa dataset was used to perform Ordinary Least Squares (OLS), Instrumental Variable (IV), and Fixed Effects (FE) estimations of the model. The study finds that perceived returns to mathematics has a positive and statistically significant relationship with mathematics achievement. Further, it was found that the positive relationship that intrinsic motivation has with mathematics achievement is increased when perceived returns to mathematics is high, but that students with low intrinsic motivation for mathematics do not perform significantly differently when their perceived returns to mathematics is higher. This provides important insight into the interaction between different types of cognitive skills. Additionally, high perceived returns to mathematics had a large and significant positive relationship with mathematics achievement for students in rural schools, and the positive relationship between perceived returns to mathematics and mathematics achievement shrunk as one progressed to a more urban school location. This shows that perceived returns to mathematics matter more for students in challenging circumstances, but, importantly, the study finds that students with high perceived returns to mathematics in rural schools still perform worse than students with low perceived returns to mathematics in urban schools. This is an important finding in the South African context where gross inequalities in education persist: non-cognitive skills are important for educational achievement, but more needs to be done to improve the functionality of poor schools in South Africa