nighttime lights

Evaluating the Impact of Infrastructure: A Beginner's Guide to Difference-in-Differences with the Jamuna Bridge

In June 1998 a 4.8-kilometre bridge over the Jamuna river connected 26 million isolated Bangladeshis to Dhaka and cut freight costs in half. This tutorial rebuilds the difference-in-differences evaluation of that bridge from the ground up in Python, using the Padma hinterland — a symmetric region left isolated by a river whose own bridge was not started until 2015 — as the comparison group. It teaches the 2x2 logic, parallel trends, two-way fixed effects, event studies and honest sensitivity analysis on satellite nighttime lights, then runs the same machinery over census employment shares, rice yields and a public-goods placebo. The two doubly robust estimators of the original paper are rebuilt by hand in NumPy and pushed through both diff-diff and pyfixest. All 122 published coefficients are audited side by side with the replication, and the defects found inside the shipped Stata package are documented in full.

Regional Inequality from Outer Space: Predicting GDP from Nighttime Lights and Building Inequality Indices in Python

A comprehensive, beginner-friendly Python replication of Lessmann and Seidel (2017) — turning satellite nighttime lights into predicted regional GDP, building five population-weighted inequality indices from scratch, exploring the cross-country dynamics of regional inequality, and estimating the regional Kuznets curve, its determinants, and a Conley spatial-HAC robustness check with PyFixest.

Bayesian average of classical estimates for panel data: Can the puzzle of the shape of the regional Kuznets curve be solved?

We study the robust determinants of regional inequality using a Bayesian average of classical estimates for panel data.

Harmonized luminosity and economic activity across provinces in China: Cross-sectional differences, regional time series, and inequality dynamics

This study explores income-luminosity dynamics in China, highlighting VIIRS's superiority over DMSP in predictive accuracy over time.

Exploring Economic Activity from Outer Space: A Python Notebook for Processing and Analyzing Satellite Nighttime Lights

This paper introduces a user-friendly geocomputational notebook that illustrates how to process and analyze satellite NTL images.

Can higher-quality nighttime lights predict sectoral GDP across subnational regions? Urban and rural luminosity across provinces in Türkiye

This study explores the potential of higher-quality nighttime light (NTL) data to predict economic activity across various sectors within regions.