the United States (see a review of the literature on spatial mismatch hypothesis by Gobillon and Selod [2014]).<sup>4</sup> We contribute to these strands of literature by showing a link between job accessibility and employment outcomes cities in Sub-Saharan Africa.

This paper is structured as follows: Section 2 describes the contexts in urban Ethiopia and Kinshasa. Note that the background about the spatial structures of Ethiopia and Kinshasa are provided in Appendix B. Section 3 explains our empirical approach, such as the conceptual framework, data, and econometric models. Section 4 presents the results and section 5 concludes.

# **2. Context**

_Ethiopia_ Ethiopia’s first COVID-19 case was observed in mid-March 2020. The number of confirmed COVID-19 cases reached over 159,072 by the end of February 2021, with nearly 2,365 recorded deaths. While the number of cases in Ethiopia peaked in August, the fact that the positive rate for the tests conducted remains at over 5 percent suggests that infections are likely to be underreported (Panel A in Figure 1).

The Government of Ethiopia has put in place a range of measures to mitigate the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, while aiming at containing transmission. Right after the first few cases of COVID19 were detected, the government implemented a state of emergency—which remained in effect until September 2020—and adopted a comprehensive COVID-19 National Emergency Response Plan to ensure that efforts to fight the crisis are comprehensive and well-coordinated. Specifically, Ethiopia implemented surveillance at borders, conducted contact tracing, established designated quarantine facilities, ensured the supply of drugs and protective equipment, and embarked on several communication efforts to raise awareness on how to deal with the virus. To mitigate impacts on people and firms, authorities announced several economic measures, including additional expenditure on healthcare, provision of emergency food to the vulnerable, tax and social security payment deferrals, and liquidity injections and extension of forbearance measures in the financial sector.

The restrictions imposed by the government on people’s movement and business operations in the early stage of the pandemic resulted in a sharp decline in mobility levels. As shown in Panel A of Figure 1, the Facebook movement data indicate that the mobility level plummeted in April 2020 to 50 percent of the baseline level—which is February 2020. This reduction in mobility was caused by both people’s voluntary responses and government restrictions on public gatherings and transport services between regions.<sup>5</sup> Unlike other countries, there was no enforcement for the closure of nonessential businesses, including restaurants, and within-region transport services.

> 4 Andersson et al. (2018), for example, find that better job accessibility reduced the duration of joblessness among low-income workers—especially blacks, women, and older workers—after a massive layoff in the United States. In the context of cities in developing countries, Franklin (2018) finds that a transport subsidy to young workers resulted in their successful job search in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Indeed, many workers face a limited level of job accessibility in Sub-Saharan African cities, as shown by Nakamura and Avner (2021) for Nairobi, Kenya.

> 5 Ethiopia is a country with a federal system, consisting of 10 regions and 2 chartered cities.

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