Date: Friday, 6 June 2025, at 2:00 pm
Venue: Seminar Room Bruguier Pacini, DEM
Speaker: Davide Fiaschi (University of Pisa)
Title: Nighttime lights as a measure of local economic activity
Abstract:
This paper investigates the use of nighttime lights as a proxy for local economic activity, focusing on Italy, Brazil, and the United States at various levels of geographical aggregation using high-resolution nightlight data from NASA’s Black Marble project. Nighttime lights appear as a robust proxy for economic activity, proxied by personal income or GDP, with elasticity values consistently around 1 across different administrative levels when all variables are expressed in density and a correction for the size of the unit of observation is inserted in the estimate as well as a control for time. Therefore, our findings support an educated use of nighttime lights as proxy for local economic activity.
Seminar organizers: Pietro Battiston
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