GDP growth is often measured poorly for countries and rarely measured at all for cities or subnational regions. We propose a readily available proxy: satellite data on lights at night. We develop a statistical framework that uses lights growth to augment existing income growth measures, under...

Drawing from the experience of the global financial crisis that sprang forth from the US stock market, an empirical assessment of the dynamic correlation analysis of financial contagion with evidence from (5) African countries (South African, Nigeria, Egypt, Kenya, Tunisia) is presented. Monthly...

This paper presents a novel framework to estimate the elasticity between nighttime lights and quarterly economic activity. The relationship is identified by accounting for varying degrees of measurement errors in nighttime light data across countries. The estimated elasticity is 1.55 for...