The commonly-used satellite images of nighttime lights fail to capture the true brightness of most cities. We show that night lights are a reliable proxy for economic activity at the city level, provided they are first corrected for top-coding. We present a stylized model of urban luminosity and...

This short article discusses urban redevelopment, and its relation to economic productivity and various concepts of well being. It notes that solutions adopted in one era are apt to be the problems of the next. The article then introduces the four articles comprising the George Mason Law Review...

Developing countries have seen a rapid rise in population urbanization in the past decades. At the same time, they have participated actively in the process of globalization. However, possible interlinks between population urbanization and trade openness in developing economies have been ignored...

We investigate how urban concentration and urbanization affect economic growth in developing countries. Using semi-parametric estimation techniques on a cross-country panel of 39 countries for the years 1960-1990 we discover a U-shaped relationship for urban concentration. this suggests the...

This paper provides a basic understanding of the nature of emerging key information and communication technologies, and establishes the distance of countries from high-quality access to the internet - the necessary threshold one needs to cross in order to make use of such technologies. The paper...

We develop an Index of Opportunities for 130 countries based on their capabilities to undergo structural transformation. The Index of Opportunities has four dimensions, all of them characteristic of a country’s export basket: (1) sophistication; (2) diversification; (3) standardness; and (4)...

We develop an Index of Opportunities for 130 countries based on their capabilities to undergo structural transformation. The Index of Opportunities has four dimensions, all of them characteristic of a country’s export basket: (1) sophistication; (2) diversification; (3) standardness; and (4)...

More than five years have elapsed since the onset of the Great Recession and to distress of all those affected by the slowdown, a decisive turning point continues to recede into the future. Growth rates are low in the OECD countries (1.25% in 2012-2013) and increasingly sluggish in the...

According to national accounts data, value added per worker is much higher in the non-agricultural sector than in agriculture in the typical country, and particularly so in developing countries. Taken at face value, this "agricultural productivity gap'' suggests that labor is greatly...