Pollution and city size: can cities be too small?

Rainald Borck and Takatoshi Tabuchi

Journal of Economic Geography, 2019, vol. 19, issue 5, 995-1020

Abstract: We study optimal and equilibrium sizes of cities in a city system model with pollution. Pollution is a function of population size. If pollution is local or per-capita pollution increases with population, equilibrium cities are too large under symmetry; with asymmetric cities, the largest cities are too large and the smallest too small. When pollution is global and per-capita pollution declines with city size, cities may be too small under symmetry; with asymmetric cities, the largest cities are too small and the smallest too large if the marginal damage of pollution is large enough. We calibrate the model to US cities and find that the largest cities may be undersized by 3–4%.

Keywords: Optimal city size distribution; agglomeration; pollution (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q54 R12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (17)

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Related works:
Working Paper: Pollution and City Size: Can Cities be too Small? (2016)
Working Paper: Pollution and City Size: Can Cities be Too Small? (2016)
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