IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/pal/intecp/978-1-349-02917-4_13.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

The City as a Firm

In: The Economics of Public Services

Author

Listed:
  • William Vickrey

    (Columbia University)

Abstract

A simplified model is produced to illustrate the proposition that, where efficiently operating cities compete on a world market, land rents representing the social opportunity costs of land occupancy will in each city aggregate to the sum of the intramarginal residues that reflect the economies of scale of the activities the existence of which within the city account for its optimal size being as large as it is. Full efficiency thus requires that all such land rents be devoted to the subsidy of these decreasing-cost industries, and the appropriation of these rents by landlords for other purposes precludes the achievement of full efficiency. Where such appropriation precludes efficiency elsewhere, and world prices are thus not at the efficiency level, it will be to the general long-run advantage of landlords in a particular city, as well as to locally constrained labour, for rents to be used for such subsidy, even though initially they may be inadequate to do the full job.

Suggested Citation

  • William Vickrey, 1977. "The City as a Firm," International Economic Association Series, in: Martin S. Feldstein & Robert P. Inman (ed.), The Economics of Public Services, chapter 13, pages 334-343, Palgrave Macmillan.
    • Handle: RePEc:pal:intecp:978-1-349-02917-4_13
    DOI: 10.1007/978-1-349-02917-4_13
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Albouy, David & Behrens, Kristian & Robert-Nicoud, Frédéric & Seegert, Nathan, 2019. "The optimal distribution of population across cities," Journal of Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 110(C), pages 102-113.
    2. Richard Arnott & Huiling Zhang, 2015. "The Aggregate Value of Land in the Greater Los Angeles Region," Working Papers 201506, University of California at Riverside, Department of Economics.
    3. Shin Lee & Jong Gook Seo & Chris Webster, 2006. "The Decentralising Metropolis: Economic Diversity and Commuting in the US Suburbs," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 43(13), pages 2525-2549, December.
    4. Duranton, Gilles & Puga, Diego, 2005. "From sectoral to functional urban specialisation," Journal of Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 57(2), pages 343-370, March.
    5. Ginsburgh, Victor & Waelbroeck, Patrick, 1998. "The EC and real estate rents in Brussels," Regional Science and Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 28(4), pages 497-511, July.
    6. Gilles Duranton & Diego Puga, 2001. "Nursery Cities: Urban Diversity, Process Innovation, and the Life Cycle of Products," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 91(5), pages 1454-1477, December.
    7. Duranton, Gilles & Puga, Diego, 2014. "The Growth of Cities," Handbook of Economic Growth, in: Philippe Aghion & Steven Durlauf (ed.), Handbook of Economic Growth, edition 1, volume 2, chapter 5, pages 781-853, Elsevier.
    8. Joseph E. Stiglitz, 2015. "In Praise of Frank Ramsey's Contribution to the Theory of Taxation," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 0(583), pages 235-268, March.
    9. Robert BICHSEL, 1999. "A Silver Rule for Financing Local Transport Facilities," Cahiers de Recherches Economiques du Département d'économie 9902, Université de Lausanne, Faculté des HEC, Département d’économie.
    10. Massimo Del Gatto, 2004. "Agglomeration, Integration, and Territorial Authority Scale in a System of Trading Cities. Centralisation versus Devolution," Working Papers 2004.93, Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei.
    11. Duranton, Gilles & Deo, Stephane, 1999. "Financing Productive Local Public Goods," Journal of Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 45(2), pages 264-286, March.
    12. Schweizer, Urs, 1996. "Endogenous fertility and the Henry George Theorem," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 61(2), pages 209-228, August.
    13. Joseph E. Stiglitz, 1982. "The Theory of Local Public Goods Twenty-Five Years After Tiebout: A Perspective," NBER Working Papers 0954, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    14. Peter Gordon & Harry W. Richardson & Gang Yu, 1998. "Metropolitan and Non-metropolitan Employment Trends in the US: Recent Evidence and Implications," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 35(7), pages 1037-1057, June.
    15. José Silva Ruiz, 2010. "La eficiencia y la equidad en la fijación de precios de los servicios públicos: evolución de la teoría de la tarifa óptima en dos partes y el caso del servicio de agua potable," Revista CIFE, Universidad Santo Tomás, June.
    16. Fred E. Foldvary, 2005. "Geo-Rent: A Plea to Public Economists," Econ Journal Watch, Econ Journal Watch, vol. 2(1), pages 106-132, April.
    17. Lok-Sang Ho, 1989. "Optimal Cities," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 26(5), pages 510-516, October.
    18. Jacques H. Dreze, 1995. "Forty Years of Public Economics: A Personal Perspective," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 9(2), pages 111-130, Spring.
    19. Stiglitz, J.E., 2015. "Devolution, independence, and the optimal provision of public goods," Economics of Transportation, Elsevier, vol. 4(1), pages 82-94.
    20. Oscar Arcos Palma, 2013. "Nociones del bienestar en las interrelaciones Ciudad sin asentamientos precarios - ciudad con asentamientos precarios," Revista Lebret, Universidad Santo Tomás - Bucaramanga, vol. 5, pages 53-68, December.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pal:intecp:978-1-349-02917-4_13. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.palgrave.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.