Using Satellite Imagery to Detect the Impacts of New Highways: An Application to India

Kathryn Baragwanath Vogel, Gordon Hanson, Amit Khandelwal, Chen Liu and Hogeun Park

No 32047, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: This paper integrates daytime and nighttime satellite imagery into a spatial general-equilibrium model to evaluate the returns to investments in new motorways. Our approach has particular value in developing-country settings in which spatially granular economic data are scarce. To demonstrate our method, we use publicly available imagery to evaluate India’s road construction projects in the early 2000s. Estimating the model and evaluating welfare impacts only requires remotely-sensed data. We find that India’s road investments improved aggregate welfare, particularly for the largest and smallest urban markets. Most welfare gains accrued within Indian districts—the unit of analysis in conventional approaches—which demonstrates the benefits of using of high-resolution satellite imagery.

JEL-codes: O1 R1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-big, nep-dev, nep-geo, nep-ppm, nep-tre and nep-ure
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