README.md

In mark-toth-econ/nightlightstats: nightlightstats

nightlightstats

Night light satellite data can be interesting if GDP data are not available (e.g. when taking a regional perspective) or measured with poor quality (e.g. in certain developing countries). Since an increase in night light illumination of 1% goes along with an increase in GDP by about 0.3% (Henderson et al., 2012), income changes can be nicely approximated with this satellite data. In the course of working as a student assistant for Jakob Miethe at the Chair of Public Economics at LMU Munich, I developed this package building up on the code he used for his paper "The elusive banker", in which he identifies non-activity in offshore financial centers through the natural experiment of hurricanes, using night light data and mirror data on bank claims. The package allows to perform calculations on night light data and build databases for any given region using the function "nightlight_calculate". Plots of the night lights in the desired area are also made very easy with "nightlight_plot". You can either work with yearly data ranging from 1992 to 2013 (https://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/eog/dmsp/downloadV4composites.html) or monthly data beginning in Apr 2014 (https://eogdata.mines.edu/download_dnb_composites.html). You can either provide own shapefiles (region, country, etc.) or have them (in the case of countries) automatically downloaded from GADM (https://gadm.org/data.html). See the helpfiles for a detailed description of the functions and their arguments.

mark-toth-econ/nightlightstats documentation built on July 27, 2020, 7:30 a.m.