The impact on household production, combined with qualitative work, provides some insights into the mechanisms behind these opposing trends. While improvements in road infrastructure offer better economic opportunities in agriculture, only some households can take advantage of these opportunities by increasing crop production in response (Table A.6). Male-headed households benefit from greater availability of one of the critical inputs into agricultural production: household labor. Female-headed households are predominantly households of widows or separated women and have on average one less working age adult compared to male-headed households.

Moreover, our respondents told us that the increased opportunities to trade agricultural products spurred two main types of changes: hiring machinery and switching to more commercially lucrative crops that also had longer cropping cycles. These changes required up-front investment, and in case of commercial crops, such as acacia trees, would not bring any returns in the short run. Such long-term or capital-intensive projects are easier to implement for households with greater availability of labor. In addition to serving as a resource for agricultural production, these projects may enable households to rely on multiple sources of income from different household members, while waiting for commercial crops with long growth cycles to yield the first crops.

While in theory female-headed households could substitute capital for labor and still make investments in agriculture, in the absence of well-developed credit markets it is hardly an option.<sup>19</sup> Increase in sales of assets may suggest an attempt by female-headed households to acquire capital for such investments. The decrease in income from agriculture may be indicative of the start of a transition process to longer growth cycle commercial crops.

# _Employment_

Existing literature suggests that roads rehabilitation is associated with increased off-farm employment (Asher and Novosad, 2016; Garz and Perova, 2014). We take advantage of the fact that VARHS contains employment information for each individual living in a household. The questionnaire asks whether each household resident older than 10 years does any work for wages, works on the household farm, is selfemployed, and does any work within the household or on common property resources. We estimate the impact of roads improvements on employment choice using Equation 2, with standard errors clustered at the village level. As our outcome variables are binary, we effectively estimate the probabilities of being employed in each type of work.

The baseline differences between men and women in employment are noted in Table A.4b—women are less likely to be working in wage work and more likely to be doing housework, and are marginally more likely to be self-employed. The main change in employment is an approximately 10 percent increase in the likelihood of working on common property resources for men (Table A.10). For women, the likelihood of increase depends on whether they live in a male- or female-headed household. For women in male-

> 19 One constraint on crop switching that affects everyone is caused by the food safety policy. This restricts switching from paddy to non-paddy cultivation for both male- and female-headed households.

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