This paper uses bio-economic modeling and simulation to investigate the de-mise of the sperm whale industry in the mid-19th century. Petroleum is widely credited both contemporaneously and today with 'saving the whales.' We investigate the transition in illumination technologies from whale oil...

Estimates of poverty are highly sensitive to price and income measures across time and space. This paper offers a complementary approach to traditional poverty measurement that ensures comparability: we use nighttime light as a proxy for poverty measurement. We measure the percentage of...

Nighttime lights data are a measure of economic activity whose measurement error is plausibly independent of the errors of most conventional indicators. Therefore, we can use nighttime lights as an independent benchmark to assess existing measures of economic activity (Pinkovskiy and...