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Hsieh and Moretti (2019) find that relaxing land-use regulations in three productive US cities would increase GDP by 3.7%. In this comment, I revisit their findings. I first replicate their exercise, and find that their counterfactual would lower output. I document errors in their code that explain this discrepancy. I next show that the results of their model depend on the arbitrary choice of population unit. I propose a modification to their model that eliminates unit dependence. Their counterfactual raises output in the modified model, but the effect is two orders of magnitude smaller than what they report.
