Rural Roads, Child Labor, and Schooling in Rural Ethiopia

Abstract

New roads bring new opportunities including access to employment. However, new employment opportunities might encourage early school dropout and school absenteeism. We investigate the link between rural roads, children’s labor allocation, and educational outcomes by focusing on the recent Ethiopian road construction program. In the analysis, we combine household panel data with novel road network data. To address endogeneity concerns, we combine a difference-in-difference estimation model with a matching technique. Our findings consistently show that road access does not encourage school absenteeism or school dropouts to join the labor force. The findings remain consistent across gender and age groups.

Keywords:

• Human capital
• child labor
• rural roads
• drought
• quasi-experiment

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• H52
• I2
• I25
• R4

Disclosure statement

The authors have no conflicting interests to disclose. All non-proprietary data and code that support the results will be shared for reproducibility purposes.

Notes

1 The Gender Parity Index is calculated as the ratio of an indicator’s values for girls to its corresponding values for boys.

2 More information can be accessed at https://www.gaez.iiasa.ac.at/.