This paper establishes that new access to public infrastructure affects both home production technologies and market employment in a developing country. Exploiting spatial and temporal variation in electricity project placement during South Africa's mass roll-out of rural household electricity, I estimate district fixed-effects models of fuel-use and employment growth, instrumenting for project placement using land gradient. Within five years, electrified areas substitute sharply towards electricity in home production and IV employment results are large, positive and significant for women. Complementary evidence using a different data set and an alternative identification strategy confirms increases in male and female hours of work and a decline in female wages in areas of expanding infrastructure. Rather than stimulating large-scale rural industrialization, the weight of evidence in this paper points towards rural electrification increasing labor supply and facilitating jobs in new, small-scale market-based services.
Trends in sexual behavior between 2002 and 2005 indicate significant shifts towards safer practices. There is little evidence of a relationship between negative economic shocks, household and community poverty, and risky behavior. We hypothesize that the unexpected positive relationship between education and sexual debut may be driven by peer effects in schools with substantial age mixing.
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