Regional Favoritism, Rebuilt
A from-scratch replication of Hodler & Raschky (2014, QJE): do regions glow brighter at night while their native son holds power? Extended with a harmonised DMSP/VIIRS panel through 2023.
- Methods
- Replication · Panel fixed effects · Nighttime lights · GIS
- Stack
- R · GIS · Nighttime lights · Panel econometrics · Quarto · Make
Hodler and Raschky found that a region grows brighter at night while it is the birth region of the sitting political leader: a clean, satellite-measured fingerprint of regional favoritism. I rebuilt that result on an independently constructed pipeline rather than the authors’ files.
What is different
- Boundaries from GADM instead of the original CIESIN source.
- Leader birthplaces from PLAD, supplemented with Wikidata.
- DMSP-OLS composites extracted locally from the raw rasters.
- An extension to 2023 on a harmonised DMSP/VIIRS nighttime-lights panel, past the point where the original sensor series ends.
How it is built
The package reproduces every table in the paper and its supplementary materials, from raw data to the final PDF and slide deck, through a 41-stage numbered pipeline orchestrated with make. The core analysis replicates HR 2014 Table II and all seven columns of Table IV, plus a 1992 to 2023 extension table. A supplementary phase covers the dynamics, determinants, continent and aid/oil tables.
The paper, supplement and presentation are rendered with Quarto and published as a website from the same repository.