Mapping regional economic activity from night-time light satellite imagery

Doll, Christopher; Müller, Jan-Peter; Morley, Jeremy

doi:10.1016/j.ecolecon.2005.03.007

Cited by 547 publications

(339 citation statements)

References 9 publications

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“…The correlation between the spatial distribution of nighttime light and economic activity has been utilized in several studies for estimating economic activity at the national and sub-national levels (Doll et al, 2000;Elvidge et al, 2001;Doll et al, 2006;Sutton et al, 2007;Henderson et al, 2012;Zhou et al, 2014). The underlying expectation, despite the researchers' ultimate goals in such literature (for example, to predict or to evaluate), is largely to improve resolution and accuracy of census statistics effectively.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Allometric scaling, size distribution and pattern formation of natural cities

Li¹,

Wang²,

Zhang³

et al. 2015

Palgrave Commun

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There has been a strong interest in more cogent definitions on economies of scale to reveal general urban growth laws and to develop urban performance metrics. Unstructured data, including satellite images, will provide us with new sources to do so by defining cities as aggregates of human activities. Such a uniform definition on the basis of nighttime light clusters is more consistent and economically meaningful than administrative or official boundaries. In comparison with patterns of city systems found in traditional census data, we examined the allometric scaling, size distribution and fractal geometry of natural cities. It can be concluded from our empirical analysis on regional, country and continental scales that a super-linear scaling between lightness and area with a stable exponent across different low light threshold levels generally holds for natural cities. But Zipf 's Law does not always apply over the whole range of lightness thresholds. Furthermore, we build a model based on the simple geometric matching mechanism to reproduce the self-organized formation process of nighttime light patterns. The statistical properties including allometries, size distributions and fractal geometries generated by our model are in good agreement with empirical evidence. These findings have profound implications for understanding the effects of simple aggregation behaviour in primitive stages of city formation and the urbanization process.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Allometric scaling, size distribution and pattern formation of natural cities

Li¹,

Wang²,

Zhang³

et al. 2015

Palgrave Commun

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“…In such a case, the contribution of crude oil prices to the gasoline price dispersion (through our variance decomposition analysis) has been estimated as about 38% or 39% (depending on the spatial measure considered) where the di¤erence between the contribution of time …xed e¤ects (about 51%) and crude oil prices has shown up in the residuals (of which contribution increased from about 10% to about 22%). 11 Therefore, replacing time …xed e¤ects with crude oil prices does not alter the result that the main contribution to the overall gasoline price dispersion during our sample period is by crude oil prices. This result is consistent with Chouinard and Perlo¤ (2007) who show using a panel of monthly observations at the state level for the 1989-1997 period that almost the entire variation in national gasoline prices is due to a rise in the price of crude oil and that acrossstate variation can be attributed to demand variation, as well as di¤erences in taxes.…”

Section: Discussion and Robustnessmentioning

confidence: 99%

Understanding gasoline price dispersion

Yilmazkuday

2016

Ann Reg Sci

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This paper models and estimates the gasoline price dispersion across time and space by using a unique data set at the gas-station level within the U.S.. Nationwide e¤ects (measured by time …xed e¤ects or crude oil prices) explain up to about 51% of the gasoline price dispersion across stations. Re…nery-speci…c costs, which have been ignored in the literature due to using local data sets within the U.S., contribute up to another 33% to the price dispersion. While state taxes explain about 12% of the price dispersion, spatial factors such as local agglomeration externalities, land prices, distribution costs of gasoline explain up to about 4%. The contribution of brand-speci…c factors is relatively minor.JEL Classi…cation: L11, L81, R32, R41,

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“…Likewise, nighttime lights have been shown to share a strong relationship with human economic activity Doll et al 2006;Chen and Nordhaus 2011;Henderson et al 2012).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The potential of nighttime light data to be used as an inventory of human settlement was identified in the 1980s . Although still not a well-used dataset within the social sciences, nighttime light data have been used in research related to economic development Doll et al 2006;Ghosh et al 2010;Chen and Nordhaus 2011;Henderson et al 2012), population (Sutton 1997;Elvidge et al 1997;Sutton et al 1997Sutton et al , 2001Pozzi et al 2002;Doll 2010a), urbanization (Imhoff et al 1997;Henderson et al 2003;Small et al 2005;Elvidge et al 2007), epidemiology (Kloog et al 2008;Bharti et al 2011), wars and crime (Agnew et al 2008;Witmer and O'Loughlin 2011), and poverty (Moor et al 2008;Elvidge et al 2009;Doll and Pachauri 2010).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Nighttime lights and population changes in Europe 1992–2012

Bustos

Hall

Andersson

2015

Ambio

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Nighttime satellite photographs of Earth reveal the location of lighting and provide a unique view of the extent of human settlement. Nighttime lights have been shown to correlate with economic development and population but little research has been done on the link between nighttime lights and population change over time. We explore whether population decline is coupled with decline in lighted area and how the age structure of the population and GDP are reflected in nighttime lights. We examine Europe between the period of 1992 and 2012 using a Geographic Information System and regression analysis. The results suggest that population decline is not coupled with decline in lighted area. Instead, human settlement extent is more closely related to the age structure of the population and to GDP. We conclude that declining populations will not necessarily lead to reductions in the extent of land development.

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Mapping regional economic activity from night-time light satellite imagery

Cited by 547 publications

References 9 publications

Allometric scaling, size distribution and pattern formation of natural cities

Allometric scaling, size distribution and pattern formation of natural cities

Understanding gasoline price dispersion

Nighttime lights and population changes in Europe 1992–2012

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