Aggregation Bias in Proxy Measurement: Nighttime Lights and Local Economic Activity
代理测量中的聚合偏差:夜间灯光与地方经济活动
This paper studies when high-resolution signals aggregated to administrative units can recover unobserved local economic activity. We develop a reverse-regression framework for signals generated by activity but used to predict it at coarser spatial supports. The main theorem decomposes predictive elasticity into elementary elasticity, reverse-regression attenuation, and a spatial aggregation term driven by unit size and within-unit dispersion, showing aggregation pulls…