Abstract
I investigate the social costs imposed by poor implementation of public infrastructure. Focusing on the period from 2005 to 2015 in Peru, when the government embarked on a nationwide initiative to expand sewerage systems, I leverage quasirandom variation in initiation of the implementation phase. By combining several sources of administrative data, I find that infrastructure development increased infant and under-5 mortality. These effects are driven by health and safety hazards associated with construction work, leading to increased deaths from accidents and waterborne diseases. The severity of these effects is more pronounced in areas where construction activity was more intense.
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© 2024 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license.
2024
The President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. For a full description of the license, please visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode.
