Replication package for "Top lights: Bright cities and their contribution to economic development"

Replication package for Bluhm and Krause (2022), "Top lights: Bright cities and their contribution to economic development", Journal of Development Economics 157, 102880.

The package rebuilds every result of the paper: the top-coding correction of the DMSP-OLS stable lights with a Pareto distribution (34 satellite-years, 1992-2013), a worldwide 10% pixel sample, a panel of 562 African cities with de-blurred urban footprints, and benchmark panels for countries, German districts, US counties and DHS clusters. It produces all 31 tables and 24 figures of the paper and the Online Appendix A-J.

It is an ex post replication kit, built in 2026 from the original code and data. The rebuilt corrected lights match the published rasters on 6.6 billion cells to within 4.5e-13, and every table prints the same numbers from the rebuilt data as from the authors' original data. Of the 55 exhibits, 42 reproduce exactly, 3 differ in small documented ways when rebuilt from raw data, 9 are places where the published paper disagrees with its own data and code (listed in ERRATA.md), and Figure J1 is a manual exhibit that no program produces.

Three entry points: the tables and figures from the analysis datasets (about 30 minutes), the panels from the corrected lights (about 12 hours), or everything from the raw satellite data (about 16 hours). Start at README.md.

This record carries the code, the documentation, the analysis datasets, the corrected lights and every derived panel the analysis needs. The raw inputs are a separate record, fetched automatically by code/setup/download_pipeline_data.sh; most replicators never need them.

Licences: code MIT, the authors' data CC BY 4.0, third-party data under their own terms. See LICENSE.txt.