also have the opportunity to switch from less-skilled employment to more- skilled occupations. Indeed, tables 5 and 6 imply that people in low-skilled jobs, and those working in agricultural occupations (in either the employed or self-employed categories) move to more-skilled occupations in response to greater access to both types of infrastructure. These effects are more pronounced in rural areas.

The OLS estimates reported in Table 12 confirm all of these results with one exception.<sup>11</sup> The joint OLS effects of these infrastructures are also qualitatively in line with the IV estimates.

The findings suggest that self-employment in agriculture - which represents 25 percent of all jobs in the DHS sample - has declined as infrastructure has expanded. This indicates that Africa is undergoing the same transition - away from agriculture and to other occupations - that has occurred previously in other global regions.

# **6 Heterogeneous effects of roads and electricity on employment**

In this section, we analyze the heterogeneity of the effects of greater access to roads and electricity. Our findings show that the impacts vary by level of economic development and by individual characteristics (gender, age, and place of residence). The analysis sheds some light on the possible mechanisms through which investment in infrastructure affects job creation.

We have seen that the effects of roads and electricity vary according to the nature of the occupation. If individual characteristics affect the likelihood of employment in particular sectors, then investments in infrastructure will likely have differential effects, depending on the characteristics of different individuals. Moreover, cultural and normative constraints on labor mobility that are prevalent in certain societies, such as those in sub-Saharan Africa, imply that investment in greater access to roads and electricity is likely to have lower impacts among members of certain groups (such as women, for example), depending on how binding such constraints are.

## **6.1 Economic development**

We analyze how the effects of roads and electricity on employment differ by level of economic development. Theoretically, heterogeneous impacts could be driven by differences in occupational choice between countries that differ in level of economic development. Agricultural occupations, for instance, might be more prevalent in less developed economies, whereas the manufacturing and service sectors might be more present in more developed economies. We classify countries according to their 2019 GDP per capita (Table 1).

The results are reported in columns 7 and 8 of Table 7 in the Appendix. The effects of road expansion on employment differ by level of economic development. In areas with high access to electric grids, increasing proximity to the road network by 10 km marginally increases employment probability by 22.1 percentage points in more-developed countries in the LSMS sample and by 32.5 percentage points in the DHS sample. In less-developed countries, the corresponding effects are 2.5 percentage points (LSMS)

> 11In locations along a main road, greater electricity access increases farming employment for the LSMS sample. The OLS results obtained from the DHS sample are consistent with the IV estimates, but with smaller magnitudes. The effects of road access in locations that have high levels of access to electricity and of electricity in locations that have high access to roads are in the same direction as the IV effects.

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