Child trafficking is a long-lasting social issue in China. We argue that abducted children increase as an indirect and unintended consequence of improved urban infrastructure, such as the construction of expressways that facilitate the expedient transfer of victims between cities. To identify...

Africa's road networks tend to have an interior-to-coast shape. As such, they are better placed to export natural resources, than to support regional trade. Are they the best response to geography and comparative advantage, or the result of political distortions? To answer this question, we...

Road quality plays an important role, especially in rural areas where most poor households are situated. This study aims to calculate the Rural Access Index (RAI), an indicator of rural road quality (SDG indicator 9.1.1), at the district level, to evaluate the implementation of the Nawacita...

This paper examines the impact of roads on structural transformation and business composition theoretically and empirically. We develop a two-sector model of regional trade with endogenous firm entry that highlights two opposing forces. \textit{Ceteris paribus} lower trade costs in...

This paper integrates daytime and nighttime satellite imagery into a spatial general-equilibrium model to evaluate the returns to investments in new motorways. Our approach has particular value in developing-country settings in which granular data on economic activity are scarce. To demonstrate...