This paper quantifies the impact of market access on local GDP in the West Bank, proxied by nighttime lights, using the deployment of road closure obstacles by the Israeli army between 2005 and 2012 as a quasi-natural experiment generating exogenous temporal and spatial variation in...

Despite the popular view that, with the advent of digital technologies, the world has become flat, geography still plays a key role in the economy. COVID-19 has brought even more awareness of this. This paper studies the impact of security measures that have reduced the mobility of people and...