Is New York City Too Small?

The NIMBY-ism (‘not in my backyard’) of local politics leads to a bias against large cities that constrains national productivity growth. That is the central conclusion of a study by Frederic Robert-Nicoud, Nathan Seegert and colleagues, presented at the annual congress of the European Economic Association in Mannheim in August 2015.

These researchers find that the world’s most productive cities – such as New York City and San Francisco – may be vastly undersized and that
society may be better off with inhabitants crowding into half as many cities as they currently do.