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Conference Agenda

Overview and details of the sessions of this conference. Please select a date or location to show only sessions at that day or location. Please select a single session for detailed view (with abstracts and downloads if available).

Please note that all times are shown in the time zone of the conference. The current conference time is: 24th Aug 2026, 01:51:50am WEST

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Daily Overview

Session

Population and Migration
Location: D-105
Session Chair: Christoph Albert, University of Turin

Presentation 2

Electrification and internal migration: Evidence from Nigeria

Angelika Budjan, Yvette Bodry

University of Stuttgart, Germany

Discussant: Brigitte Roth Tran (Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco)

Rising regional inequality has renewed interest in place-based infrastructure investments as a tool for promoting local economic development. This study uses the large-scale roll-out of electric transmission infrastructure in Nigeria from 2009 to 2015 to quantify the effect of electrification on internal migration. We address endogenous allocation of electricity infrastructure by estimating effects on peripheral households not directly targeted by the policy, in combination with instrumenting for the actual grid path using a hypothetical least-cost grid. Results show an increase in individual migration propensity by 6 percent and a reduction in household size by 0.8 individuals, mainly driven by young adults and older teenagers. These effects are consistent with electrification relaxing credit constraints while generating limited local employment opportunities for younger individuals. Results from a gravity model of migration show a reduction in the elasticity of migration with respect to movement costs and a rise in migration to rural, electrified destinations following the electricity supply shock. Taken together, these findings suggest that productivity-enhancing place-based infrastructure investments may facilitate out-migration from disadvantaged areas and have unintended implications for regional inequality and urbanization.