Data page for Dingel, Miscio, Davis

This page provides the metropolitan areas defined for Brazil, China, and India in "Cities, Lights, and Skills in Developing Economies." See the paper for details of our algorithm, which aggregates administrative spatial units on the basis of continguous areas of light in nighttime satellite images.

In each CSV file, each row contains a distinct spatial unit, identified by a numeric key. Columns also identify the unit's name, latitude, and longitude. Variables of the form "msa_night_X" identify the metropolitan area to which the administrative spatial unit belongs when our night-lights-based algorithm is implemented using a light-intensity threshold of X.