Coastline

There are several data sources for coastline across the globe. The coastline data is useful to calculate the distance to the nearest coastline (with the Near tool in ArcGIS), which can be used as a control variable in a cross-sectional regression.

Natural Earth (the resolution: 1 to 10 meters)

GSHHG (Global Self-consistent, Hierarchical, High-resolution Geography Database)

• Very detailed. Based on the World Vector Shoreline project (Soluri and Woodson 1990). For Antarctica, it is based on Bohlander and Scambos (2007). See GSHHG's readme file for detail. 
• Used by Henderson et al. (2018), to predict where nighttime lights are observed.