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Productivity and City Size: A Critique of the Evidence
Abstract
A critique of two leading articles in the productivity and city-size literature results in revised estimates of the productivity advantages of large cities. In particular, extant estimates of the elasticity of productivity with city size are revised downward by over 100 percent for the manufacturing sector and about 25 percent for the entire urban economy. After revision, productivity advantages of larger cities are found to be much larger for the nonmanufacturing sector than for the manufacturing sector. Hence, revitalization policies for large cities should be focused on nonmanufacturing sectors.
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Citations
Cited by
The Determinants of Agglomeration
Rosenthal, S. S., & Strange, W. C. (2001) · Journal of Urban Economics · doi:10.1006/juec.2001.2230 · Cited by 1,161
THE MAGNITUDE AND CAUSES OF AGGLOMERATION ECONOMIES
Puga, D. (2010) · Journal of Regional Science · doi:10.1111/j.1467-9787.2009.00657.x · Cited by 939
Bettencourt, L. M. A., Lobo, J., Strumsky, D., & West, G. B. (2010) · PLoS ONE · doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0013541 · Cited by 651
Estimating Agglomeration Economies with History, Geology, and Worker Effects
Combes, P.-P., Duranton, G., Gobillon, L., & Roux, S. (2010) · Agglomeration Economics · doi:10.7208/chicago/9780226297927.003.0002 · Cited by 386
Metadata
- Authors
- Moomaw, R. L.
- Venue
- The Quarterly Journal of Economics
- Publisher
- Oxford University Press (OUP)
- Published
- 1981-11
- Volume
- 96
- Issue
- 4
- Pages
- 675
- ISSN
- 0033-5533 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W2170861145
- Cited by
- 276
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 10.78
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Productivity and City Size: A Critique of the Evidence. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.2307/1880747
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- Moomaw, R. L. (1981). Productivity and City Size: A Critique of the Evidence. The Quarterly Journal of Economics. https://doi.org/10.2307/1880747
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
