TY  - JOUR
A1  - Borck, Rainald
A1  - Tabuchi, Takatoshi
T1  - Pollution and city size: can cities be too small?
T2  - Journal of Economic Geography
N2  - 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%.
KW  - Optimal city size distribution
KW  - agglomeration
KW  - pollution
Y1  - 2018
UR  - https://publishup.uni-potsdam.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/48209
SN  - 1468-2702
SN  - 1468-2710
VL  - 19
IS  - 5
SP  - 995
EP  - 1020
PB  - Oxford Univ. Press
CY  - Oxford
ER  -