time periods in which we are able to detect a statistically significant effect of Fonden on night lights. For example, figure 5b indicates that Fonden has a statistically significant effect between 7 and 18 months, while figure 5d indicates that the impact of Fonden could be detected for up to two years after the disaster.

In figures 6a and 6b we verify that our composite processing choices have had no bearing on the results. Specifically, in figure 6a instead of using pixel level averages that use information from overlapping satellites when available, we limit ourselves to information derived solely from the F16 and F18 satellites. In figure 6b we additionally address the concern that our estimates might be biased by the presence of top coded pixels, and exclude these very bright, but upper truncated pixels from the analysis. While, as expected, these estimates are less precisely estimated than those of figure 5c, they are of similar magnitudes and they further confirm the time period over which the impact of Fonden can be confidently established.

All in all, these figures consistently indicate that Fonden has a statistically significant impact on night lights between 7 and 17 months after a disaster has taken place. The coefficients also suggest that the implied economic impact of Fonden is of considerable magnitude. In figure 5a the 12 month point estimate is 0.57 log points (t=1.93). This coefficient implies that municipalities with access to Fonden grew 6.5% more than those without Fonden in the year following the disaster.<sup>8</sup> This estimate of the impact of Fonden is not directly comparable with the ones derived from the annual light composites, because it is derived from a different sample.<sup>9</sup> Nonetheless, taken at face value it does suggest that the estimates derived from annual composites are likely to be lower bounds of the impact of Fonden.

The key difference between the estimates, is that the estimates derived from annual composites are naturally constrained by the calendar year. Accordingly, these estimates will necessarily average over events that can last as many as 12 or 23 months after the disaster has taken place. Since the effect of Fonden on night lights begin to decrease after 15 months it is reasonable for the annual composites to provide smaller estimates of the impact of Fonden on night lights.

In order to further investigate the dynamics of the impact of Fonden in figures 6c we estimate the impact of Fonden when the dependent variable is the night lights log difference between the average 12 months before the disaster and a 9 month moving average in the post disaster period. Figure 6d reports results from a similar exercise where we use a 12 month moving average. The key finding, is that consistent with our previous results the impact of Fonden on night lights is largest between 7 and 15 months in figure 6c and between 4 and 15 months in figure 6d. In all

> 8We calculate the impact of Fonden on local economic activity by multiplying the IV estimate by the elasticity of light to GDP from the annual fluctuation specification, table 6 panel B column 2.

> 9 Monthly composites cover a longer time period, thereby allowing us to use a larger sample of events, see section 4 for details.

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