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The Global Spatial Distribution of Economic Activity : Nature, History, and the Role of Trade
Henderson, J. Vernon - 2016
We study the distribution of economic activity, as proxied by lights at night, across 250,000 grid cells of average area 560 square kilometers. We first document that nearly half of the variation can be explained by a parsimonious set of physical geography attributes. A full set of country...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012456530
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Ethnic Inequality
Alesina, Alberto F. - 2012
This study explores the consequences and origins of between-ethnicity economic inequality both across and within countries. First, combining satellite images of nighttime luminosity with the historical homelands of ethnolinguistic groups we construct measures of ethnic inequality for a large...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012460149
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Measuring Firm Activity from Outer Space
Bilicka, Katarzyna A.; Seidel, André - National Bureau of Economic Research - 2022
reporting choices. In this paper, we collect a novel dataset on the light that factories emit at night for a large sample of car …
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013191040
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The Value of Luminosity Data as a Proxy for Economic Statistics
Chen, Xi - 2010
One of the pervasive issues in social and environmental research has been to improve the quality of socioeconomic data in developing countries. Because of the shortcoming of standard data sources, the present study examines luminosity (measures of nighttime lights) as a proxy for standard...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012462340
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Measuring Economic Growth from Outer Space
Henderson, J. Vernon - 2009
growth to augment existing income growth measures, under the assumption that measurement error in using observed light as an …
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012463450
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Newer Need Not be Better : Evaluating the Penn World Tables and the World Development Indicators Using Nighttime Lights
Pinkovskiy, Maxim - 2016
Penn World Tables and of the World Development Indicators better estimate true income per capita. We find that revisions of …-price series in both PWT 8.0 and PWT 8.1, the two most recent vintages of the PWT. We additionally find that the World Development … Indicators are as good, and often better, measures of unobserved true income as are any recent vintages of the Penn World Tables …
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012456459
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The Agglomeration of Urban Amenities : Evidence from Milan Restaurants
Leonardi, Marco; Moretti, Enrico - National Bureau of Economic Research - 2022
In many cities, restaurants and retail establishments are spatially concentrated. Economists have long recognized the presence of demand externalities that arise from spatial agglomeration as a possible explanation, but empirically identifying this type of spillovers has proven difficult. We...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012814438
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The Making of the Modern Metropolis : Evidence from London
Heblich, Stephan - 2018
Modern metropolitan areas involve large concentrations of economic activity and the transport of millions of people each day between their residence and workplace. We use the revolution in transport technology from the invention of steam railways, newly-constructed spatially-disaggregated data...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012480700
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The Area and Population of Cities : New Insights from a Different Perspective on Cities
Rozenfeld, Hernán D. - 2009
The distribution of the population of cities has attracted a great deal of attention, in part because it sharply constrains models of local growth. However, to this day, there is no consensus on the distribution below the very upper tail, because available data need to rely on the "legal" rather...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012463240
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Birds of a Feather - Better Together? Exploring the Optimal Spatial Distribution of Ethnic Inventors
Agrawal, Ajay - 2007
We examine how the spatial and social proximity of inventors affects knowledge flows, focusing especially on how the two forms of proximity interact. We develop a knowledge flow production function (KFPF) as a flexible tool for modeling access to knowledge and show that the optimal spatial...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012465834