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 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...

April 2000 - If urban overconcentration really is an issue, it ought to affect economic growth rates in a robust, consistent fashion. And it does. Not only is there an optimal degree of urban concentration that varies with country income, but departures from optimal concentration result in...