We are pleased to announce the winners of the 2025 Francis Wilson Memorial Prize!
Dissertation Prize – Awarded to Tsepang Khumalo, PhD (Stellenbosch). Main advisor is Marisa Von Fintel, co-advisor is Ronelle Burger. The award is given to Tsepang for her Chapter “The mental health impact of adolescents ageing out of South Africa’s Child Support Grant”.
Tsepang’s dissertation focuses on how different social policies in South Africa impact wellbeing and health. Over the last two decades, research into the effects of conditional and unconditional cash grants in developing countries has exploded. Many researchers have looked at the economic impacts of South African social policies like the old age pension and the child support grant, especially because these grants were at the leading edge of unconditional cash transfers in low-income settings. Tsepang’s dissertation work brings new and important questions to this literature. In particular, the chapter for which this award is given asks about how the mental health of grant recipients is impacted when these grants disappear.
Tsepang examines the impact of the child support grant, leveraging timing in the increase in the age eligibility to look at the ending of this grant on mental health among adolescents. Due to the variation in cessation of timing, she implements a regression discontinuity research design. The data she uses are the publicly available South African NIDS (National Income Dynamics Study) data from 2010 to 2017. Her main result is that when the CSG disappears as beneficiaries age out of eligibility, their depressive symptoms increase. Investigating mechanisms, Tsepang finds that this deterioration in mental health is related to increased anxiety and worry, increased pressure to enter the labour market, and concerns about school dropout.
The committee was enthusiastic about this paper because the results point to a neglected aspect of social protection: how beneficiary mental health changes when cash transfers are withdrawn, particularly when this coincides with critical life stages. We also liked the careful empirical strategies implemented using the NIDS data. This paper is now at the revise and resubmit stage at one of the top field journals, the Journal of Development Economics, which reflects the quality and importance of Tsepang’s work. Her chapter is well-deserving of the Francis Wilson dissertation prize.
Article Prize – Awarded to Yuxiang Ye (Wits University), Steven Koch and Xianmeng Ye, for their paper “The effect of temperature on household electricity consumption: Evidence from South Africa”, published in the journal Energy in 2025.
This interesting piece of collaborative work brings together economists Yuxiang Ye and Steven Koch, and engineer Xianmeng Ye. This interdisciplinary team uses a novel matched dataset to describe how electricity consumption in rural areas changes with respect to changes in temperature. The energy-climate research tends to focus on developed countries or urban areas of low-income countries, partly due to data availability. This literature finds an inverted U shape in energy consumption, whereby households use more electricity at both high and low temperatures, with less energy use at moderate temperatures. Little is known about this energy-climate relationship in rural areas of developing countries, and Yuxiang’s paper tries to fill this important gap.
The committee especially liked the way the research team used hourly temperature data from the South African Weather Service matched to public data on household-level energy consumption by hour, the DELS dataset available through DataFirst. Using this matched dataset and a variety of fixed effects, they describe the patterns in household energy use. Ye and her team find that contrary to much of the literature, the energy-temperature gradient is flatter, and that energy use falls monotonically as temperatures rise. This lack of increase in energy use as temperatures rise is likely related to the fact that most households do not have access to air conditioners, and so cannot use appliances to cope with rising temperatures. This paper raises some important questions for future research, about what the pace of appliance adoption will be in rural areas in future, and how such adoption might change this energy-climate relationship.