Nighttime lights data are a measure of economic activity whose error is plausibly independent of the measurement errors of most conventional indicators. Therefore, we can use nighttime lights as an independent benchmark to assess existing measures of economic activity (Pinkovskiy and...

Household surveys suffer from persistent and growing underreporting. We propose a novel procedure to adjust reported survey incomes for underreporting by estimating a model of misreporting whose main parameter of interest is the elasticity of regional national accounts income to regional survey...

We use a parametric method to estimate the income distribution for 191 countries between 1970 and 2006. We estimate the World Distribution of Income and estimate poverty rates, poverty counts and various measures of income inequality and welfare. Using the official $1/day line, we estimate that...