Transport costs are widely considered an important barrier to local economic activity but their impact in developing countries is not well-studied. This paper investigates the role of inter-city transport costs in determining the income of Sub-Saharan African cities, using two new data sources....

This paper estimates a synthetic difference-in-differences specification on the roll-out of a program providing free bus transit for women in several Indian states, to examine the impact on women's time allocation and labor supply. Household expenditures on buses fall and women save time on...

Previous work on transportation investments has focused on average impacts in high- and middle-income countries. We estimate average and heterogeneous effects in a poor continent, Africa, using roads and cities data spanning 50 years in 39 countries. Using changes in market access due to distant...

We study the distribution of economic activity, as proxied by lights at night, across 250,000 grid cells of average area 560 square kilometers. We first document that nearly half of the variation can be explained by a parsimonious set of physical geography attributes. A full set of country...