The View from Above: Applications of Satellite Data in Economics

Abstract

Photographic images of the Earth from above have been recorded since the late 19th century, initially by cameras attached to balloons, kites, or pigeons. This remotely sensed information has been used for economic analysis since at least the 1930s; for example, Monmonier (2002) discusses how several dozen photographic crews started flying over US farmland in the 1930s to study production and conservation, and by 1941 had recorded images of more than 90 percent of total acreage. However, the past decade or so has seen a dramatic change in the way that economists can learn by watching our planet from above. A revolution has taken place in remote sensing and allied fields such as computer science, engineering, and geography. Petabytes of satellite imagery have become publicly accessible at increasing resolution, many algorithms for extracting meaningful social science information from these images are now routine, and modern cloudbased processing power allows these algorithms to be run at global scale. This paper seeks to introduce economists to the science of remotely sensed data, and to give a flavor of how this new source of data has been used by economists so far and what might be done in the future.We group the main advantages of such remote sensing data to economists into three categories: 1) access to information difficult to obtain by other means; 2) unusually high spatial resolution; and 3) wide geographic coverage.

Persistence of cities: Evidence from China

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How long do satellites need to overlap? Evaluation of climate data stability from overlapping satellite records

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Estimating Economic Characteristics with Phone Data

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