GDP growth is often measured poorly for countries and rarely measured at all for cities or subnational regions. We propose a readily available proxy: satellite data on lights at night. We develop a statistical framework that uses lights growth to augment existing income growth measures, under the assumption that measurement error in using observed light as an indicator of income is uncorrelated...

The study provides a framework to develop economic resilience index for West Virginia counties based on the premise that county economic resilience depends on its physical and human resources, structure and diversity of its economic base (employment and income diversity), entrepreneurial activity and business dynamics and scale and proximity (spatial issues). Using 17 indicators along four of t...

Most readers of this article are already familiar with images of “the earth at night.” Looking at such images, it is easy to see that the brightness of visible lights is strongly related to both population density and income per capita. The effect of population density shows up in the visibility of urban agglomerations, coastlines, river valleys, and the higher density of population along the p...

Due to insufficient sample sizes in national surveys, strikingly little is known about issue preferences at the level of Congressional districts in the United States, and existing studies focus only on a single issue dimension. This paper takes a first step toward filling this gap by developing a hierarchical Bayesian model to combine survey and census data to estimate the median of each congre...

This paper assesses the quality of various micro level measures of social capital. It begins by examining a simple model of social capital accumulation in which households acquire social capital by devoting resources to forming relationships with other households. Through these relationships households acquire access to social resources which raises utility for any level of consumption. Tests o...

Capital flows are responsible for a strong influence on the foreign exchange rates and stock prices macroeconomic parameters. In volatile economies, capital flows can change due to several types of social, political and economic events, provoking oscillations on these parameters, which are recognized as economic crises. This work aims to investigate how these two macroeconomic variables are rel...