The Impact of Local Digital Infrastructure Expenditure on Women’s and Men’s Employment

This paper examines the impact of local digital infrastructure (DI) expenditure on women’s and men’s employment using data from the UK Household Longitudinal Study linked with detailed local authority (LA) expenditure records for England in 2019-24. Our starting point is a fixed-effects multinomial logit (MNL) model that distinguishes three labour market states: paid employment, self-employment, and non-employment. It shows that greater DI expenditure raises the relative risk of both paid employment and self-employment relative to non-employment. A £10 per capita increase in DI spending is found to raise the probability of employment by 0.9 percentage points in the same financial year and by 1 percentage point in the following year, equivalent to 1.2-1.3% of the mean. Both women’s and men’s employment respond, and the gender difference is not statistically significant. Our results suggest that investment in DI can enhance employment plausibly by enabling home-based and technology-enabled work but is unlikely to close the gender gap in employment.