Resources

Publicly available spatial and satellite data for development and urban research:

Working with night lights. Matt Lowe’s Night Lights and ArcGIS: A Brief Guide (2014) walks from the raw downloads to an analysis-ready dataset, covering clipping, gas-flare removal, and projections. The ArcGIS workflow still holds; its data links predate the move to the Earth Observation Group, so pair it with the VIIRS and DMSP links above. (Linked via the Internet Archive: the original MIT URL now 404s.)

Village and town data for India. SHRUG, the Socioeconomic High-resolution Rural-Urban Geographic Platform, is open data covering over 500,000 villages and 8,000 towns in India, from the Development Data Lab.

Aggregated catalogs. The UPenn Libraries GIS guide (global and US spatial data) and the geo4.dev data catalog (development-focused) list many more sources.

GIS data sources for the social sciences, grouped by topic and then by country, from Gordon McCord’s list. Sources already in the geospatial table above (DHS, IPUMS, and the EOG night lights) are left out.

Multi-topic

• Free GIS Data - Robin Wilson’s catalog of free datasets, by topic and by country
• DIVA-GIS - country-level boundaries, roads, railways, elevation, land cover, and population density
• Natural Earth - free vector and raster base maps at 1:10m, 1:50m, and 1:110m scales
• Stanford EarthWorks - a searchable geospatial data repository
• HYDE - History Database of the Global Environment: gridded population and land use over the last 12,000 years
• G-Econ - Yale’s gridded economic activity at 1-degree cells, for several years
• Simulated VIIRS night lights - a consistent annual series from 1992 at about 500 m, built by simulating VIIRS-like values from DMSP images (Chen et al. 2024)

Demography and income

• WorldPop - high-resolution gridded population, global and by country
• Meta population density maps - population density estimated from buildings detected in satellite imagery; files on HDX
• CIESIN (Columbia) - gridded population, urban extents, and other socioeconomic data; its SEDAC collection is searchable in NASA Earthdata

Infrastructure

• OpenStreetMap - crowd-sourced street maps for the whole world
• gROADS - Global Roads Open Access Data Set, version 1 (1980-2010), from CIESIN
• Accessibility to Cities (Malaria Atlas Project) - travel time to the nearest city in 2015 at 1 km (Weiss et al. 2018), listed as “Travel time to cities” on that page

Agriculture

• EarthStat - global gridded crop areas and yields by crop, pasture, and fertilizer use
• SAGE (Wisconsin) - environment and agriculture datasets from the Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment
• GRACE (NASA) - monthly changes in water storage, groundwater included, from satellite gravity measurements
• Gridded yield changes under 1-3°C of warming - maize, rice, soy, and wheat (Moore et al.)
• Land Matrix - a public database of large-scale land deals
• FAO AgroMaps - subnational agricultural production and yields over time, shared through McCord’s Dropbox

Health

• Malaria Ecology Index - the stability of malaria transmission implied by local temperature, rainfall, and the dominant mosquito vector (Kiszewski et al. 2004), extended and validated against serological data in McCord and Anttila-Hughes (2017)

Conflict

• PRIO (Peace Research Institute Oslo) - conflict datasets, including Conflict Site (georeferenced armed conflicts, 1989-2008) and PRIO-GRID (a global grid with conflict, socioeconomic, and environmental variables)

Weather and climate

• University of Delaware temperature and precipitation - monthly gridded land data at 0.5 degrees, hosted by NOAA
• TerraClimate - monthly high-resolution temperature, precipitation, and water-balance variables, 1958 onward

Other environmental data

• Global Solar Atlas - solar energy potential
• Global Wind Atlas - wind energy potential

Hazards

• Natural Disaster Hotspots (Columbia) - global mortality and economic-loss risk from earthquakes, volcanoes, landslides, floods, drought, and cyclones (data)
• Dartmouth Flood Observatory archive - large flood events worldwide, 1985-2010, on HDX

Urban areas

• Atlas of Urban Expansion (NYU, UN-Habitat, and the Lincoln Institute) - urban extent of a global sample of 200 cities, 1990-2015, with growth back to the 19th century for some cities

China

• China Data Online - Chinese statistics from yearbooks and censuses (subscription)
• Free Chinese GIS data - an Apollo Mapping guide centered on the China Historical GIS
• China in Time and Space (CITAS) - an archived University of Washington collection of Chinese spatial data
• AidData’s Chinese development finance data - China’s development finance abroad, project by project

Japan

• e-Stat GIS - Japan’s official statistics portal, with boundary files and small-area data
• University of Michigan guide to Japan GIS data - datasets and GIS files, including boundaries from the Tokugawa (Edo) and Meiji periods
• Healthcare professionals in Japan - Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare tables (PDF, in Japanese)

Mexico

• CONABIO geoportal - downloadable biodiversity GIS data
• INEGI - Mexico’s statistics office, with municipal-level data to merge onto municipal boundaries

United States

• GeoPlatform.gov - the federal government’s geospatial data portal
• TIGER/Line shapefiles - Census boundaries from states down to blocks, plus roads
• data.census.gov - Census Bureau tables, the successor to American FactFinder
• LEHD - Census Bureau employer-household data, including commuting flows
• Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care - health-care resources and use by ZIP code and primary care service area
• School locations (NCES EDGE) - geocoded public and private schools
• MarineCadastre.gov - ocean data for US waters, including vessel traffic
• NOAA sea level rise data - sea level rise inundation data for the US coast
• CDC Social Vulnerability Index - vulnerability by census tract and county
• Social Deprivation Index (Robert Graham Center) - down to ZIP code and census tract
• USGS National Map downloader - elevation, hydrography, land cover, and other base layers
• NASA smoke, dust, and ash data - near real-time satellite products for tracking smoke plumes
• USA Cropland (Esri, from the USDA Cropland Data Layer) - crop type at 30 m, annually since 2008

US state and local

• LA County Open Data
• California Open Data
• California State Geoportal
• NYC Open Data
• Florida Geographic Data Library
• US City Open Data Census - which US cities publish which open datasets

San Diego region

• SANDAG Regional Data Warehouse (SanGIS)
• City of San Diego Open Data

Sub-Saharan Africa

• Sub-Saharan public hospitals - a geocoded database of public hospitals (Harvard Dataverse)
• Georeferenced Afrobarometer (AidData) - geocoded survey responses from 37 African countries on citizens’ priorities, local and national institutions, public services, and corruption

Publicly available datasets with a validated mental-health or wellbeing measure, plus a few open-replication economics papers and speech/audio depression corpora; free with registration unless a restricted/paid flag is noted. Sleep has its own section below, though the survey tables here also note what sleep each dataset collects.

Development and low- or middle-income country panels

United States, UK & Europe

Cross-national and global

Subjective wellbeing (life satisfaction and happiness, not clinical mental health)

Columns in the four tables above: MH / sleep measures = each dataset's mental-health instruments and any sleep data it collects (from the questionnaires / codebooks). Youth available? = whether adolescents / young adults are covered (by age in a filterable general sample, by student status, or as a youth-only sample).

Key mental-health economics papers (with public replication data)

Detecting depression from speech / audio - public corpora, mostly from the speech-ML and clinical communities (I found no economics study that has released audio-based depression data):

• DAIC-WOZ / E-DAIC (USC). Field-standard English corpus: clinical interviews, audio + transcripts, PHQ-8 labels (the AVEC benchmark). Free but restricted (signed application, institutional email).
• Androids Corpus. Italian speech (reading + interview), clinician diagnoses; open direct download (academic terms).
• EATD-Corpus. Chinese speech + text with SDS depression labels; open download.
• MODMA (Lanzhou). Audio (+ EEG), clinical MDD diagnosis; free but account + agreement.

Sleep measured objectively (actigraphy, wearables, polysomnography) alongside self-report, plus the economics field experiments that have collected it. For sleep items inside the large mental-health panels (IFLS, MxFLS, Add Health, HRS, Understanding Society, and others), see the survey tables in the mental health section above.

Sleep in economics field experiments - objective wearable/actigraphy sleep alongside self-report and economic outcomes:

Objective sleep-data repositories (polysomnography and actigraphy):