Similar looking Lorenz Curves can imply very different income density functions and potentially lead to wrong policy implications regarding inequality. This paper derives a relation between a Lorenz Curve and the modality of its underlying income density: Given a parametric Lorenz Curve, it is...

The commonly-used satellite images of nighttime lights fail to capture the true brightness of most cities. We show that night lights are a reliable proxy for economic activity at the city level, provided they are first corrected for top-coding. We present a stylized model of urban luminosity and...

The emergence and growth of cities are shaped by both geographical features and institutional factors. We are able to analyze their interplay at different levels of the urban hierarchy by exploiting a unique data set on cities in imperial China from 221 BCE to 1911 CE, a geographically diverse...

This paper studies how limitations on land suitable for development affect within-city variation in urban density and its three components: crowding, residential coverage, and building height. We use the high variation in geographical obstacles − such as steep land slopes and the presence of...