Study title

This project develops a novel procedure for proxying economic activity with daytime satellite imagery across time periods and spatial units, for which reliable data on economic activity are otherwise not available. In developing this unique proxy, we apply machine-learning techniques to a historical time series of daytime satellite imagery from the Landsat program dating back to 1984. Compared to satellite data on night light intensity, another common economic proxy, our proxy more precisely predicts economic activity at smaller regional levels and over longer time horizons. Our procedure is generalizable to any region in the world, and it has great potential for analyzing historical economic developments, evaluating local policy reforms, and controlling for economic activity at highly disaggregated regional levels in econometric applications. Therefore, we produce our proxy for any region in the world and publish the data as georeferend TIF files in this repository. In our paper, we demonstrate our measure’s usefulness for the example of Germany, where East German data on economic activity are unavailable for detailed regional levels and historical time series.