Road maintenance and local economic development: Evidence from Indonesia’s highways
利用印度尼西亚1990-2007年道路质量数据，研究发现道路维护投资通过促进制造业就业、减少非正规就业、提高劳动收入以及改变生活成本（降低易腐食品价格、提高房价）来影响居民福利，福利弹性为0.1，效益成本比为2.3。
This paper estimates the local welfare impacts of highway maintenance investments. We instrument road quality exploiting Indonesia’s two-step budgeting process for allocating funding to local road authorities. Using comprehensive data on road quality from 1990–2007, we find evidence that better roads help manufacturers create new jobs, enabling worker transitions out of informal employment, and increasing labor income. Road quality also changes the cost of living, reducing perishable food prices but also raising housing prices. We estimate the elasticity of household welfare with respect to road quality to be 0.1 and the benefit/cost ratio for road maintenance investments to be 2.3.