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 …

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 …

This paper studies the causal effect of transport infrastructure on the spatial distribution of
economic activity within subnational regions across a large number of developing countries …

How do weather anomalies affect the economy at the local level? This paper presents a new
data set that links weather data to annual average night-light emission data for 24.000 0.5°× …

This paper studies the impact of the US-China tariff war on China, using high-frequency
night lights data and grid-level measures of tariff exposure. Exploiting within-grid variation …

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 …

Existing studies typically find that natural disasters have negative economic consequences,
resulting in, at best, a recovery to trend after initial losses or, at worst, longer term sustained …

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 …

Nighttime lights are routinely used as a proxy for economic activity when official statistics are
unavailable and are increasingly applied to study the effects of shocks or policy …

Night lights data are increasingly used in applied economics, almost always from the
Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP). These data are old, with production …