Remote sensing of night light emissions in the visible band offers a unique opportunity to
directly observe human activity from space. This has allowed a host of applications including …

Night lights, as detected by satellites, are increasingly used by economists, typically as a
proxy for economic activity. The growing popularity of these data reflects either the absence …

Nighttime light remote sensing has been an increasingly important proxy for human
activities. Despite an urgent need for long-term products and pilot explorations in …

Popular DMSP night lights data are flawed by blurring, top-coding, and lack of calibration.
Yet newer and better VIIRS data are rarely used in economics. We compare these two data …

Nighttime lights (NTL) are a popular type of data for evaluating economic performance of
regions and economic impacts of various shocks and interventions. Several validation …

Satellite-derived nighttime light (NTL) data from the Defense Meteorological Satellite
Program's Operational Linescan System (DMSP-OLS) and the Suomi National Polar-orbiting …

We estimate the causal real economic effects of a randomized anti-corruption crackdown on
local governments in Brazil using rich micro-data on corruption and firms. After anti …

We demonstrate that it is theoretically ambiguous whether growth of cities matters more to
the rural poor than growth of towns. We then test empirically whether the economic growth of …

We examine the average causal impact of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti on economic growth
and recovery by conducting a disaggregated empirical analysis at the subnational level. To …

The use of nighttime lights (NTL) data to proxy for local economic activity is well established
in remote sensing and other disciplines. Validation studies comparing NTL data with …