Despite unprecedented vertical growth in large cities, the economics of skyscrapers remain understudied. We combine data on tall buildings with a panel of land prices covering 140 years to analyze the determinants of urban heights. We provide estimates of the land price elasticity of height, the height elasticity of construction cost, and the elasticity of substitution between land and capital for tall buildings. The land price elasticity of height increased substantially over time, and it is larger for commercial than for residential buildings, which suggests that the supply side helps to produce the typical segregation of urban land uses.

This paper develops a quantitative model of internal city structure that features agglomeration and dispersion forces and an arbitrary number of heterogeneous city blocks. The model remains tractable and amenable to empirical analysis because of stochastic shocks to commuting decisions, which yield a gravity equation for commuting flows. To structurally estimate agglomeration and dispersion forces, we use data on thousands of city blocks in Berlin for 1936, 1986 and 2006 and exogenous variation from the city’s division and reunification. We estimate substantial and highly localized production and residential externalities. We show that the model with the estimated agglomeration parameters can account both qualitatively and quantitatively for the observed changes in city structure. We show how our quantitative framework can be used to undertake counterfactuals for changes in the organization of economic activity within cities in response for example to changes in the transport network.