Top Lights - Bright Cities and their Contribution to Economic Development

Arbeitspapier

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 empirical evidence which both suggest that these ‘top lights’ follow a Pareto distribution. We then propose a simple correction procedure which recovers the full distribution of city lights. Applying this approach to cities in Sub-Saharan Africa, we find that primate cities are outgrowing secondary cities but are changing from within.

Object Details

• Language: Englisch

References and Relationships

• Bibliographic citation: Series: CESifo Working Paper ; No. 7411

Classification and Topics

• Classification: Wirtschaft ; Economic Development: General ; Economic Development: Urban, Rural, Regional, and Transportation Analysis; Housing; Infrastructure ; Regional Economic Activity: Growth, Development, Environmental Issues, and Changes ; Size and Spatial Distributions of Regional Economic Activity
• Subject: development ; urban growth ; night lights ; top-coding ; inequality

Contributors, Places and Time

• Event: Geistige Schöpfung
• (who): Bluhm, Richard ; Krause, Melanie
• Event: Veröffentlichung
• (who): Center for Economic Studies and ifo Institute (CESifo)
• (where): Munich
• (when): 2018

Further information

• Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/198771
• Last update: 10.03.2025, 11:42 AM CET