Title - Urban Public Works: Experimental Evidence from Ethiopia (with Simon Franklin)

Abstract: Public works are common anti-poverty policies around the developing world. They generate employment and build public infrastructure, and have direct effects on program beneficiaries as well as equilibrium effects, which affect the entire population. This paper provides a comprehensive evaluation of an urban public works program, Ethiopia's PNSP. We take advantage of its random roll-out across neighborhoods of Addis-Ababa to show that the program increased local wages and improved local amenities. We then use unique data on city-wide commuting flows to calibrate a spatial equilibrium model and compute the welfare effects of the program on the poor.