Melanie Krause

Leipzig University · Business and Economics

Studying the components of neighborhood population density reveals a complex picture that little is known about. Hidden under the same level of population density, neighborhoods can vastly differ in crowding, if residential coverage or building heights are moving in opposite directions. We study this heterogeneity in density components and how it i...

The severity of climate disaster impacts is shaped not only by the intensity of the events themselves but also by the exposure, vulnerability, and adaptive capac- ity of affected communities. The lack of globally comparable data integrating local societal and climatic conditions poses significant challenges to understand- ing which factors transfor...

Soil is central to the complex interplay among biodiversity, climate, and society. This paper examines the interconnectedness of soil biodiversity, climate change, and societal impacts, emphasizing the urgent need for integrated solutions. Human‐induced biodiversity loss and climate change intensify environmental degradation, threatening human well...

We examine the nexus between extreme weather events, urban expansion and tree cover loss in a global data set of regions from 163 countries spanning the years 2001-2018. We delve into how droughts and floods may drive rural-urban migration, triggering urban expansion that often leads to deforestation. This deforestation can in turn exacerbate flood...

The emergence of cities in specific locations depends on both geographical features (such as elevation and proximity to rivers) and institutional factors (such as centrality within an administrative region). In this paper, we analyse the importance of these factors at different levels of the urban hierarchy. To do so, we exploit a unique data set o...

Tracking the development of cities in emerging economies is difficult with conventional data. This paper shows that nighttime lights can be used as a reliable proxy for economic activity at the city level, provided they are first corrected for top-coding. The commonly-used satellite images of nighttime light intensity fail to capture the true brigh...

Regional Convergence, Commuting, Spatial Weight Matrix, Shock Propagation, Time-Space Dynamic Panel Data Model

In this paper, we take a global view at air pollution looking at cities and countries worldwide. We pay special attention at the spatial distribution of population and its relationship with the evolution of emissions. To do so, we build i) a unique and large dataset for more than 1200 (big) cities around the world, combining data on emissions of CO...

Not everybody is benefiting equally from rising mean incomes. We discuss the mean-income population share (M P S), defined as the population share earning less than the mean income, as an indicator of how representative the mean income is for the mass of the population. This measure is both analytically tractable and simple to interpret to inform t...

Not everybody is benefiting equally from rising mean incomes. We discuss the mean-income population share (MPS), the population percentage of earners below mean income, whose evolution can capture how representative rising mean values are for middle income households. Tracking MPS and its associated income share MIS over time indicates to what exte...

We study the relationship between changes in weather patterns and the spatial distribution of population and economic activity within countries. Our unique global dataset combines climatic and census data for the period 1950–2015 with satellite data on built-up areas, and light intensity at night for the 1990–2015 periods. We establish a global non...

We provide new insights on the city size distribution of countries around the world. Using more than 10,000 cities delineated via geo‐spatial data and a globally consistent city identification scheme, we investigate distributional shapes in all countries. In terms of population, we find that Zipf's law holds for many, but not all, countries. Contra...

Unconditional convergence across countries worldwide is typically rejected in terms of GDP per capita. But when focusing on a specific internationally competitive industry, such as manufacturing, rather than the overall economy, unconditional convergence has been found to hold. As the epitome of competition and globalization, this paper uses the pe...

We provide new insights on the city size distribution of countries around the world. Using geo-spatial data and a globally consistent city identification scheme, our data set contains 13,844 cities in 194 countries. City size is measured both in terms of population and night time lights proxying for local economic activity. We find that Zipf's law...

The commonly-used satellite images of nighttime lights fail to capture the true brightness of most cities. We show that night lights are a reliable proxy for economic activity at the city level, provided they are first corrected for top-coding. We present a stylized model of urban luminosity and empirical evidence which both suggest that these 'top...

Tracking the development of cities in emerging economies is difficult with conventional data. We show that satellite images of nighttime lights are a reliable proxy for economic activity at the city level, provided they are first corrected for top-coding. The commonly-used data fail to capture the true brightness of many cities. We present a styliz...

This paper proposes an easy-to-use nonparametric indicator for club convergence, or convergence within clusters of countries: it measures whether the modes of the gross domestic product (GDP) per capita distribution become more pronounced over time. Relying on changes in the critical bandwidth for unimodality, the indicator is a dynamic extension o...

Research paper proposing a new indicator for club convergence in countries' income per capita distribution: Are poorer and richer countries converging towards separate points?

Similar looking Lorenz curves can imply very different income density functions and potentially lead to wrong policy implications regarding inequality. This paper derives a relation between a Lorenz curve and the modality of its underlying income density: given a parametric Lorenz curve, it is the sign of its third derivative which indicates whethe...