Bigger cities do not mean much greater growth – study

Benefits of agglomeration are “surprisingly little”, NBER paper argues

city data

Economic growth would only be minimally thwarted if large cities did not exist, researchers at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) have found.

The paper, published this month, examines the conventional wisdom that metropolises are engines of growth. It looks at data on population, output and patents in US cities from 1900 to 2010.

The authors – Matthew Turner and David Weil – consider a counterfactual scenario in which US cities are smaller than historically observed.

They explore two

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