This study aims to provide global evidence on the net impact of new airport investment on urban economic development by analyzing cities with/without new airport construction in a quasi-experimental design framework. A two-way fixed difference-in-differences (DID) method along with Mahalanobis distance matching (MDM) is applied to scrutinize the causal association of new airport investment with urban economic development. This empirical analysis assumes nighttime light intensity at a grid-cell scale of 15 arc-second as an economic indicator. We regress nighttime light intensity from 2015 to 2019 for 27 treatment cities with new airport construction from 2015 to 2017 and other control cities selected from 13,038 cities in the world. The estimation results indicate that new airport construction increases nighttime light intensity by (1) about 10.8 % in cities that had demonstrated relatively low nighttime light intensity and (2) about 9.5 % in cities that had introduced their first airports. This study presents empirical evidence on the positive economic impacts of new airport investment for relatively small cities in emerging economies, wherein economic statistics are insufficient or unavailable.

本研究旨在通过在准实验设计框架中分析有/没有新机场建设的城市，为新机场投资对城市经济发展的净影响提供全球证据。采用双向固定双重差分法 (DID) 和马哈拉诺比斯距离匹配 (MDM) 来检验新机场投资与城市经济发展的因果关系。该实证分析假设 15 弧秒网格单元尺度的夜间光强度作为经济指标。我们对2015年至2017年新建机场的27个处理城市以及从全球13,038个城市中选出的其他控制城市进行了2015年至2019年夜间光照强度的回归。估算结果表明，新机场的建设使夜间光强度增加了（1）夜间光强度相对较低的城市约10.8%，（2）已引进第一个机场的城市约9.5%。本研究提供了关于新机场投资对新兴经济体中相对较小的城市的积极经济影响的实证证据，这些城市的经济统计数据不充分或不可用。