The paper examines whether there is a significant relationship between economic growth and the degree of urban concentration, as measured by primacy, or the share of the largest metro area in national urban population. Is there reason to believe many countries have excessive primacy and how...

Urban flooding poses danger to people and places. People can adapt to this risk by moving to safer areas or by investing in private self-protection. Places can offset some of the risk through urban planning and infrastructure investment. By constructing a global city data set that covers the...

Quality-adjusted population density (QAPD) is population divided by land area that has been adjusted for geographic characteristics. We derive weights on these geographic characteristics from a global regression of population density at the quarter-degree level with country fixed effects. We...

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...

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...

GDP growth is often measured poorly for countries and rarely measured at all for cities. We propose a readily available proxy: satellite data on lights at night. Our statistical framework uses light growth to supplement existing income growth measures. The framework is applied to countries with...