In June 2010 Professor Dr. Norbert Koubek gave his valedictory lecture. He retired after four decades in the Department of Business and Economics at the University of Wuppertal. In his lecture 'Light and its economic consequences as a fundamental phenomenon' Professor Dr. Norbert Koubek refers...

Market productivity is often greater, and leisure and other household activities more enjoyable, when people perform them simultaneously. Beyond pointing out the positive externalities of synchronicity, economists have not attempted to identify exogenous causes that affect timing. We develop a...

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...

We study the determinants of households’ choices of lighting fuels in Kenya including the option of using solar home systems (SHS). Our goal is to add new evidence on the factors that influence the introduction and adoption of decentralized and less carbon-intensive energy sources in...