He calculates that RSDP reduced transport costs and increased Woreda-level average yields. Kebede (2021) uses village-level data and finds that rural roads on average increased real agricultural income. Dercon et al. (2009) study a panel of 15 agricultural villages over a decade (1994–2004) and find that access to all-weather roads reduces poverty by 6.9 percentage points and also increases consumption growth markedly (by 16.3 percentage points). Atkin and Donaldson (2015) study trade costs in Ethiopia and Nigeria and find that the effect of distance on trade costs is about four times larger than in the United States. We add to this literature a focus on land use: beyond nighttime luminosity, we also use a recently released landcover panel dataset that allows us to track landcover at an annual frequency.<sup>2</sup> This allows us to go beyond the traditional use of nighttime lights as proxy for economic activity and also focus on the quantity of land allocated to agriculture or farm production (cropland area) versus urban uses throughout the country.

Second, we contribute to the broad literature on the effects of transportation infrastructure.<sup>3</sup> Our analysis is related to that of Mitnik et al. (2018), who use nighttime lights as an outcome with a two-way fixed effects approach and find that road rehabilitation in Haiti from 2004 to 2013 leads to increases of 6—26% in luminosity (corresponding to 0.5–2.1% increases in GDP). Similarly, BenYishay et al. (2018) evaluate road upgrades in the West Bank using panel data and find a 0.341 increase in absolute luminosity; given that baseline nighttime lights was 2.6, a 0.341 increase represents a significant increase. Storeygard (2016) constructs a panel of Sub-Saharan African cities using nighttime lights data and studies the effect of trade costs on economic activity. Asher and Novosad (2020) find effects of rural roads on non-farm employment but not on agricultural outcomes, income, or assets. Asher et al. (2020) estimate the effect of road construction on deforestation using satellite-based measures of forest cover. Faber (2014) finds that a national highway program in China aimed at connecting provincial capitals caused a reduction in GDP growth in small peripheral counties that the highways passed through. We add to this literature on transportation infrastructure investments by using satellite imagery to study development in a context where urbanization rates are low and where we observe a large-scale national investment program that was gradually rolled out over regions and time.

Third, we also contribute to the urban and regional economics literature on land use more generally.<sup>4</sup> For example, Deng et al. (2008) use high-resolution satellite imagery data to study urban expansion in China. This literature often builds on the monocentric city model, where the land use in and around a central business district depends on transportation costs. Michaels et al. (2012) consider a model of urbanization and structural transformation where land is allocated to residential, agricultural, or non-agricultural land use. Motamed et al. (2014) show that the transition from rural to urban activity depends on trade costs as

> 2The data is publicly available at `https://www.esa-landcover-cci.org/?q=node/175` .

> 3See Redding and Turner (2014) and Donaldson (2015) for surveys of the literature.

> 4See Duranton and Puga (2015) for an overview of theoretical and empirical literature on urban land use.

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