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 reforming education systems in Africa with South Africa’s national administrative data.

Published

01 November 2026

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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 reforming education systems in Africa: how school systems measure learning, how learning creates jobs, how to maintain outcomes at lower cost, 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 data into decisions.

Research Interests

Primary fields: Development Economics, Economics of Education
Secondary fields: Economic History, Public Economics

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

Making School-Set Assessments Comparable: How School Assessments Hide Learning Inequality (2026)
Puts school-set marks from 1.2 million Grade 7–8 transitions on one scale (two-way fixed effects). On raw marks the gap between rich and poor schools halved between 2018 and 2022; on the common scale it did not narrow.
Provision Not Deployment: What a Teacher Post Buys in South African Schools (2026)
About half of a formula-owed teacher post reaches class size (IV). With the teachers they already have, schools could cut the class the average learner sits in by up to a fifth, from 43 to 35 learners.
Invisible Borders, Living Institutions: How Apartheid’s Bantustans Still Shape Schooling (2026)
Crossing into the former KwaZulu homeland raises a child’s risk of repeating a grade, and crossing out lowers it, by roughly 10–13% (within-child movers design); schools inside pay 9.20% less per educator head on the same national pay scale.

Experience

Independent Consultant Western Cape Education Department (Gates Foundation-funded programme, 2025–): advised on reading-assessment data as testing scaled to about 200,000 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

Seminar Tutor Institutional Economics (BSc Philosophy, Politics and Economics), Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam	Apr 2026 – May 2026
Thesis Supervisor Four BSc theses and second assessor for an MSc thesis, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam	2024 – 2026
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

Grants & Awards

C. Lowell Harriss Dissertation Fellowship Lincoln Institute of Land Policy (Research on property valuation and taxation)	2025
Emergent Ventures Grants (three) Mercatus Center, George Mason University (research on land value taxation in South Africa, its computing costs, and the visit to Oxford)	2024 – 2025
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

Annual Conference on Quantitative Education Research (QER), Stellenbosch Recovering School Value-Added from School-Set Marks: How Lenient Grading Hides Learning Inequality	Oct 2026
Economics Lunch Seminar, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam Making School-Set Marks Comparable: Does Lenient Grading Buy a Better Secondary School?	Sep 2026
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
RESEP Brown Bag Lunch, Stellenbosch University Smaller Classes, Fewer Teachers: Quantifying the Cost of Teacher Misallocation	Nov 2025
Economics Lunch Seminar, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam Smaller Classes, Fewer Teachers: Quantifying the Cost of Teacher Misallocation	Oct 2025
World Economic History Congress, Lund University, Sweden Invisible Borders – Persisting Scars: How the Apartheid Bantustans Define Contemporary South Africa	Jul 2025
Department of Basic Education, Research, Monitoring and Evaluation Education Policy for Inclusive Economic Growth During Fiscal Consolidation	Jun 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
RESEP Brown Bag Lunch, Stellenbosch University Education Policy Towards Inclusive Economic Growth During Fiscal Consolidation: Reflections on a Report Produced for National Treasury’s Operation Vulindlela	Jul 2024
Geoist Institute Summer Conference, Château de Villers, France Workshop: Land Value Tax and a Land Reparations Dividend for South Africa	Jun 2024
Economics Lunch Seminar, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam Invisible Borders – Persisting Scars: How the Apartheid Bantustans Define Contemporary South Africa	Mar 2024
15th Swedish Economic History Meeting, Lund University, Sweden Invisible Borders – Persisting Scars: How the Apartheid Homelands Define Contemporary South Africa	Sep 2023
3rd Pretoria–Stellenbosch PhD Workshop in Economics, Stellenbosch, South Africa Invisible Borders – Persisting Scars: How the Apartheid Homelands Define Contemporary South Africa	Jul 2023
RESEP Brown Bag Lunch, Stellenbosch University Class Sizes and Learner–Educator Ratios: Descriptive Statistics of Student–Teacher Allocation Efficiency Ratios	May 2023
RESEP Brown Bag Lunch, Stellenbosch University Mathematical Stunting in South Africa: An Analysis of Grade 5 Mathematics Outcomes in TIMSS 2015 and 2019 (with N. Spaull and J. Qvist)	Oct 2022
Spatial Economics Workshop, Stellenbosch University Spatial Inequality and the Former Homelands: An Application of Administrative Education Data	May 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)
Languages: English (Native), Dutch (Beginner)