[insert title here][Author][Date]ieConnect Impact Evaluation WorkshopRio de Janeiro, BrazilJune 22-25, 2015

Roads, Jobs, and Labor Mobility in Brazil Melanie Morten (Stanford University)22 June 2015

Brazil: wages differ across regions

Young (2014): inequality within a country• 45% explained by rural-urban wage gaps• Only 17% by education

Do roads help people reach good jobs?

• Use the natural experiment of Brasilia• Solves an important problem• Do roads get built because there is a lot of demand? • Or, do roads cause demand?

• Here: roads built to connect Brasilia with state capitals• The places along the way get roads “by accident”

• We then look to see if migration patterns depend on access to roads

Brazil: Rodovias radiais (radial highways)

Heat map: bilateral travel times

Results: roads are important for migration

• Baseline migration rates: 7%• Reducing the road cost by half causes:• Migration increases by 20%• Welfare increases by 4%• Dispersion of welfare reduces by 3.5%

• Full paper: trade and housing markets• Take home: roads help people move to where they

are better off• Same issues important many other places:• Figures: Tanzania, Kenya, Malawi, Indonesia

Tanzania

Kenya

Malawi

Indonesia