Monthly nighttime-lights panel and station-opening registry for mass transit in Lima and Callao, 2012-2026

This dataset supports a study of how the opening of metro and bus rapid transit stations affects local economic activity in metropolitan Lima and Callao, proxied by satellite-measured nighttime luminosity, and of the conditions under which that inference is credible. It contains three things. First, a hand-collected registry of 76 mass transit stations with commercial opening months verified against primary sources of the Peruvian transport authorities (ATU, AATE and OSITRAN) rather than press coverage; where a station opened first in free trial operation and only later charged fares, both dates are recorded. Second, a monthly panel of 500 m cells covering the metropolitan area from April 2012 to April 2026, with VIIRS Day/Night Band radiance, cloud-free coverage counts, Sentinel-5P nitrogen dioxide, and urban structure covariates from WorldPop, the Global Human Settlement Layer, Copernicus DEM and Dynamic World. Third, the complete build and estimation code: the Earth Engine extraction notebook, the Stata programs that construct the panel, run the matching and produce the staggered difference-in-differences estimates, the permutation inference routines, and the Python scripts that generate the figures and maps. The panel is provided already built, so the analysis can be reproduced without re-running the satellite extraction, and the raw Earth Engine exports are included for anyone who wants to rebuild it from the composites. The station registry is the component that does not exist elsewhere. Opening dates for Lima's network are scattered across authority documents, operator announcements and press reports that frequently disagree, and the distinction between trial operation and fare collection is rarely made explicit. Assembling and verifying it was a substantial part of the work, and it is reusable well beyond the study it was built for.