Transportation infrastructure can improve workers’ access to existing economic opportunities, but it can also reshape economic opportunity itself by influencing where and what kinds of firms locate. This paper studies how public transit infrastructure influences firm location, composition, and employment at the neighborhood level. We construct novel data tracking over one million establishment entries and employ both difference-in-differences and market access specifications, exploiting the phased expansion of the Delhi Metro Rail in India. Transit access increases firm entry near stations, with larger, established retail and service firms locating first and inducing subsequent entry of other firms. These patterns create new economic hubs in peripheral areas, increasing employment per capita, especially for women in a context of low baseline female labor force participation. Counterfactual decompositions using a quantitative spatial model with estimated gender-specific commute elasticities reveal that compositional shifts toward larger establishments and consumer-facing industries that ex-ante employ more women account for the majority of this differential employment effect. Understanding how infrastructure reshapes the demand side of the labor market is thus critical for predicting and enhancing its distributional impacts.
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