TI Complexity in Economics Seminars

Speaker(s)
Roy van der Weide (World Bank, United States)
Date
Wednesday, 15 March 2017
Location
Amsterdam

This paper exploits temporal and spatial variation in the deployment of Israeli army road obstacles in the West Bank during 2004-2012 to quantify the marginal effects of market access on the local economies of Palestinian locations. We construct a comprehensive metric of market accessibility to assess how obstacles affect locality-level growth, proxied for by nighttime lights. Panel regressions find a 10% relative increase in market accessibility generates a 1-3% relative increase in a location’s growth rate of lights.