Trade data are typically reported at the level of regions or countries and are therefore aggregates across space. In this paper, we investigate the sensitivity of standard gravity estimation to spatial aggregation. We build a model in which initially symmetric micro regions are combined to form...

Nighttime lights are increasingly used by social scientists as a proxy for economic activity and economic development in subnational spatial units. However, so far, our understanding of what nighttime lights capture is limited. We construct local indicators of household wealth, education and...

Inequality between ethnic groups has been shown to be negatively related to GDP, but research on its effect on contemporary economic growth is limited by the availability of comparable data. We compile a novel and comprehensive dataset of harmonized Gini indices on ethnic inequality for...

We study the impact of the Indian trade liberalization of 1991 on development at the district level using satellite nighttime lights per capita as a proxy for development. We find that on average trade liberalization increased nighttime lights per capita but there was considerable heterogeneity...

We use panel data from Germany to analyze the effect of population density on urban air pollution (nitrogen oxides, particulate matter and ozone). To address unobserved heterogeneity and omitted variables, we present long difference/fixed effects estimates and instrumental variables estimates,...