How Market Access Shapes Wellbeing and Values: Experimental Evidence from the D.R. Congo

Classical liberals argue that the expansion of market access promoted prosociality, hard work, and thrift, while according to more critical schools of thought, markets ushered in a more self-interested, secular, and unsatisfied homo economicus. We examine these ideas in a field experiment involving 4,200 individuals across 300 Congolese villages that provided free motorcycle transportation to the largest urban market in the province one day per week for six months. Market access increased household income by 15% nine months after the intervention by facilitating enduring connections to urban traders and stimulating trade in cash crops. However, it eroded subjective wellbeing on average and made participants feel further away from their desired income, likely by generating within-village inequality and altering the reference points of market ``losers.'' Market access also has a secularizing effect: participants view religious faith as a less important moral value and a weaker determinant of success in life. Instead, they believe more in their own agency and in the value of hard work, productivity, education, income, and saving. An urban placebo treatment arm helps attribute these effects to market access, separate from exposure to the city and urban social networks more generally.