Why Humanity Loves, Needs, Cities?

Edward L. Glaeser, professor of economics at Harvard wrote a blog "Why Humanity Loves, Needs, Cities" in The New York Times. He quotes a study conducted by Pierre-Philippe Combes, GREQAM researcher, joint with three other researchers (1 ).

Published April 13, this forum explains why people choose to live in very dense cities when huge territories are free. If the emergence of cities is certainly due to the fact that they connect people and enable them to learn from each other, what happens when cities subsequently further increase their size? A NBER (National Bureau of Economic Research) conference organized 30 months ago delivered a book published in February 2010 with many new insights into these issues.

Whereas it is clear that wages and productivity are positively correlated with density, the question tackled by the French researchers is whether causality goes from density to productivity (cities make agents more productive) or in the reverse direction (high productivity attracts agents, making cities larger).

The forum on line

(1) "Estimating Agglomeration Economies with History, Geology, and Worker Effects", Pierre-Philippe Combes, Gilles Duranton, Laurent Gobillon, Sébastien Roux in Agglomeration Economics (dir. E.L. Glaeser), ed. University of Chicago Press, février 2010, p.15-65. Document de travail Greqam 2008-51.