Jobs! Electricity shortages and unemployment in Africa

To what extent does unreliable electricity provision pervasive in many African countries affect job creation in the region? I address this question by assembling household and firm-level data from 29 African countries along with unique project-level data on foreign direct investment (FDI). Leveraging several quasi-experimental approaches, I find that outages have a non-trivial negative impact on employment. The effect is driven by a reduction in employment in non-agricultural sectors and skilled jobs. Unskilled jobs are unaffected by electricity outages. The negative effect of outages on firm entry and the performance of incumbent firms are plausible channels.