TY  - BOOK
AU  - Albouy,David
AU  - Behrens,Kristian
AU  - Robert-Nicoud,Frédéric
AU  - Seegert,Nathan
ED  - National Bureau of Economic Research.
TI  - The Optimal Distribution of Population across Cities
T2  - NBER working paper series
PY  - 2016///
CY  - Cambridge, Mass.
PB  - National Bureau of Economic Research
N1  - November 2016; Hardcopy version available to institutional subscribers
N2  - The received economic wisdom is that cities are too big and that public policy should limit their sizes. This wisdom assumes, unrealistically, that city sites are homogeneous, migration is unfettered, land is given freely to incoming migrants, and federal taxes are neutral. Should those assumptions not hold, large cities may be inefficiently small. We prove this claim in a system of cities with heterogeneous sites and either free mobility or local governments, where  agglomeration economies, congestion, federal taxation, and land ownership create wedges. A quantitative version of our model suggests that cities may well be too numerous and underpopulated for a wide range of plausible parameter values. The welfare costs of free migration equilibria appear small, whereas they seem substantial when local governments control city size
UR  - https://www.nber.org/papers/w22823
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.3386/w22823
ER  -