As shown in column 1, rural households in the treated communities were 18.2 percent more likely to sell crops (row A) and sold a 32.2 percent larger amount or crops (row B)—or 6.5 percentage points larger share of crops (row C)—between 2012 and 2014. The increased crop sales, however, tapered off between 2014 and 2016 and resulted in no clear impacts between 2012 and 2016 (column 5). Nevertheless, agricultural impacts are clear in remote areas. As column 7 shows, among the households in remote areas, those with a connection to rural roads were 16.1 percent more likely to sell crops between 2012 and 2016. These results demonstrate that rural road developments have influenced agricultural outcomes of farmers in remote areas by providing better access to markets.

However, it is not clear whether rural farmers connected to rural roads have increased the use of fertilizer (row D in Table 8). Rural households were 3.6 percent more likely to use fertilizer in kebeles with rural roads between 2012 and 2016 (column 5). However, this estimate is very marginal and not statistically significant. This finding contradicts the expectation that lower transport costs lower input costs and facilitate the adaptation of modern technologies among farmers, as demonstrated by recent empirical studies, such as Minten, Korn, & Stifel (2013) for Ethiopia, Damania et al. (2016) for Nigeria, and Aggarwal (2018) for India.

Some of the recently connected households started to engage in wage jobs. Table 9 summarizes the results of DID matching with the share of household members who engaged in wage jobs as the outcome. The impact is not clear when all household members are analyzed (row A in column 5). However, among communities that were exposed to droughts during 2014 and 2016, rural roads increased the share of household members with wage jobs by 2.8 percentage points (column 4). The impacts were particularly large among women and the youth in remote areas. The development of rural roads there resulted in the increase in the share of female and young members with wage jobs by 2.6 percentage points (row B) and 7.5 percentage points (row C), respectively. Given the very small share of wage workers in the sample (Table 3), this impact is by no means marginal.

# **5-3. Robustness check**

The estimated welfare impacts are robust against the choice of household consumption measures (Table 10). The rural road impacts on household consumption above are measured as the percent change in consumption based on the natural logarithm of consumption values (reported again in row A for the sake of comparison). Estimating the impacts as the changes in the level of consumption (using the non-log real consumption values as the outcome variable) in row B shows that rural roads increased annual household consumption by 1,132 birr between 2012 and 2016. In addition, the estimation results with the log of nominal consumption show that the estimated impacts are robust against the price adjustment (row C). Focusing on only food consumption does not substantially change the impact estimate (a 17.8 percent increase between 2012 and 2016, row D).

As opposed to household consumption, the effects of rural roads for reducing food insecurity are less clear (except for remote communities). The ESS asked whether the household had a situation in which they did not have enough food to feed the household during the last 12 months. The results of the matching DID analysis for the all rural kebeles do not show any clear effects (row E 11