Curriculum Vitae

Development economist · education systems and administrative data

Curriculum vitae of Peter Courtney, development economist and joint PhD candidate at Stellenbosch University and VU Amsterdam, working on education systems, teacher allocation and administrative data in South Africa.
Published

30 September 2026

📄 Download CV (PDF)

Address: School of Business & Economics, De Boelelaan 1105, 1081 HV Amsterdam, Netherlands; Faculty of Economic and Management Sciences, Stellenbosch Central, Stellenbosch, 7602, South Africa
Get in touch:
LinkedIn • Substack • Website

Profile

I am a development economist completing a PhD on spatial inequality in education: how school systems measure learning, how they allocate teachers, and why gaps between places persist. I work with South Africa’s national administrative records at full scale: the learner register (65 million learner-years), teacher payroll and exam data. I also run a consultancy that helps education departments and Gates Foundation-supported programmes in South Africa, Kenya and West Africa turn learning-assessment data into dashboards and decisions.

Research Interests

  • Primary fields: Development Economics, Economics of Education, Economic History
  • Secondary fields: Spatial Econometrics, Political Economy, Land Policy

Education

Joint PhD in Economics
Stellenbosch University & Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam 		2022 – Jul 2027 (expected)
Visiting Researcher
FAIR, Norwegian School of Economics (NHH), Bergen
Host: Vincent Somville 		Mar 2026 – Apr 2026
Recognised Student (Visiting DPhil), Public Policy
Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford
Host: Clare Leaver 		Jan 2026 – Mar 2026
MSc International Development Studies (Economics of Development), Cum Laude
Wageningen University and Research, Netherlands
Dissertation: “Invisible Borders – Persisting Scars: How the Apartheid Homelands Define Contemporary South Africa” 		Sep 2019 – Sep 2021
Bachelor of Commerce: Honours in Economics
University of Cape Town 		Jan 2018 – Nov 2018
Bachelor of Social Science: Philosophy, Politics & Economics (with distinction in each major)
University of Cape Town 		Jan 2015 – Nov 2017

Doctoral Research

Data: LURITS learner register (65 million learner-years), PERSAL teacher payroll, EMIS and exam records; Department of Basic Education approval for linked learner-level records (2026).

  • Common Currency: Making School-Set Grades Comparable, and Sorting on the Exchange Rate of Learning (2026)
    Puts school-set marks from 1.2 million Grade 7–8 transitions on one scale (two-way fixed effects). Raw marks hide over half the learning gap between rich and poor schools.
  • Provision Meets Deployment: What a Teacher Post Buys in South African Schools (2026)
    About half of a formula-assigned teacher post reaches class size (IV). Existing teachers could cut the average class from 43 to 35 learners.
  • The Institution Persists: Apartheid’s Homeland Borders, Teacher Allocation and Schooling (2026)
    Crossing into the former KwaZulu homeland raises a child’s risk of repeating a grade by 10–13% (within-child movers design); schools inside spend 9.2% less per educator under a uniform pay scale.

Experience

Independent Consultant
  • Western Cape Education Department (Gates Foundation-funded programme, 2025–): advised on reading-assessment data as testing scaled to 300,000+ learners; built the pipeline and dashboard shown to the MEC’s steering committee.
  • Usawa Agenda, Kenya (Gates Foundation technical assistance, 2025–26): data pipeline, national dashboard and report figures for the 2025 household and school learning assessment.
  • Gates Foundation: built a team to deliver a prototype dashboard of PASEC learning results for West Africa.
  • Bureau for Economic Research, Stellenbosch University (2026): built an auditable LLM pipeline that ranks 133 provisions of South Africa’s mining law (MPRDA) by likely economic harm, using pairwise judgements checked in both orders, a Bradley–Terry fit and source audits.
2025 – Present
Research Assistant
Roy Havemann, How to Fix a Country (Jonathan Ball Publishers, 2024) 		2023 – 2024
Research Associate
J-PAL Africa, Shakuma Violence Prevention Evaluation (PI: Julian Jamison)
  • Led research operations: survey design, fieldwork with 5,000+ children, OCR digitisation and final reports. Managed the Western Cape Government, implementing partner and J-PAL relationships.
May 2022 – Dec 2022
Consultant Research Economist & Educational Video Script Writer
Money & Macro 		Aug 2021 – Aug 2022
Agricultural Economics Intern
United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation 		Sep 2020 – Aug 2021
Research Assistant
University of Cape Town School of Economics 		Jun 2020 – Oct 2020

Teaching Experience

Teaching Assistant
Economics of Education (871), Stellenbosch University
Designed & taught Stata-based assignments 		Jul 2022 – Dec 2022
University Tutor
Philosophy, Politics, & Economics, University of Cape Town 		Jan 2018 – Nov 2018

Policy Papers & Publications

Peer-reviewed Book Chapters

Policy Papers & Reports

Thesis

Grants & Awards

C. Lowell Harriss Dissertation Fellowship
Lincoln Institute of Land Policy (Research on property valuation and taxation) 		2025
Emergent Ventures Grant
Mercatus Centre, George Mason University (Machine Learning Land Valuation in Cape Town) 		2022
Oppenheimer Memorial Trust Scholarship
Comprehensive doctoral funding 		2022
Orange Knowledge Programme Fellow
Fully funded by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs for MSc studies in the Netherlands 		2019 – 2021

Grant values available upon request

Conferences & Workshops

RESEP Brown Bag Lunch, Stellenbosch University
Common Currency: Making School-Set Grades Comparable, and Sorting on the Exchange Rate of Learning 		Sep 2026
FAIR Coffee Meeting, NHH Norwegian School of Economics, Bergen
Smaller Classes with Fewer Teachers: Identifying the Costs of Teacher Misallocation in South Africa 		Apr 2026
SA-TIED Phase II Close-Out Conference
Education Policy for Inclusive Economic Growth During Fiscal Consolidation 		Mar 2026
DPhil Research Development Seminar, Blavatnik School of Government, Oxford
Smaller Classes with Fewer Teachers: Identifying the Costs of Teacher Misallocation in South Africa 		Mar 2026
Oxford South Africa Discussion Group
Invisible Borders – Persisting Scars: How the Former Bantustans Reproduce Learning Inequality 		Mar 2026
CSAE Workshop, University of Oxford
Smaller Classes with Fewer Teachers: Teacher Misallocation in South African Primary Schools 		Feb 2026
SALDRU Seminar, University of Cape Town
Smaller Classes, Fewer Teachers: Quantifying the Cost of Teacher Misallocation 		Nov 2025
SA-TIED – Operation Vulindlela Webinar, Government Technical Advisory Centre (GTAC)
Education Policy for Inclusive Economic Growth During Fiscal Consolidation 		May 2025
Economic Policy Staff Seminar, National Treasury (SA-TIED – Operation Vulindlela)
Education Policy for Inclusive Economic Growth During Fiscal Consolidation 		Oct 2024
Oxford Economics September Summer School, University of Oxford, United Kingdom
Treatment Effects: Beyond the Basics (Econometrics, Morning Sessions); Machine Learning (Econometrics, Afternoon Sessions) 		Sep 2024
VU Seminar, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Invisible Borders – Persisting Scars: How the Apartheid Bantustans Define Contemporary South Africa 		Mar 2024
Third Annual UP-SU PhD Workshop in Economics, Stellenbosch, South Africa
Invisible Borders – Persisting Scars: How the Apartheid Homelands Define Contemporary South Africa 		2023
Swedish Economic History Meeting, Lund, Sweden
Invisible Borders – Persisting Scars: How the Apartheid Homelands Define Contemporary South Africa 		2022

Slides for most talks are on the Presentations page.

Technical Skills

  • Programming: R (Advanced; preferred), Stata (Advanced), Python (Intermediate), Git
  • Data products: Interactive web dashboards
  • GIS: R (Advanced; preferred), QGIS (Advanced), ArcGIS Pro (Advanced)
  • Document Preparation: LaTeX (Advanced)