This paper takes a step in empirically testing the implications of a number of theoretical models that attempt to highlight the dynamics behind currency crises. By focusing on countries with broadly disparate economic and political arrangements, the study attempts to determine the extent to...

We study the distribution of economic activity, as proxied by lights at night, across 250,000 grid cells of average area 560 square kilometers. We first document that nearly half of the variation can be explained by a parsimonious set of physical geography attributes. A full set of country...