If you were to force America's 11 largest cities to be no larger than Miami, real income per American would fall by 7.9%; if planning regulations were lifted entirely, real income would rise by 25.7%

Urban Growth and its Aggregate Implications. Gilles Duranton, Diego Puga. NBER Working Paper No. 26591, December 2019. https://www.nber.org/papers/w26591

We develop an urban growth model where human capital spillovers foster entrepreneurship and learning in heterogenous cities. Incumbent residents limit city expansion through planning regulations so that commuting and housing costs do not outweigh productivity gains. The model builds on strong microfoundations, matches key regularities at the city and economy-wide levels, and generates novel predictions for which we provide evidence. It can be quantified relying on few parameters, provides a basis to estimate the main ones, and remains transparent regarding its mechanisms. We examine various counterfactuals to assess quantitatively the effect of cities on economic growth and aggregate income.

1. If you restricted New York City and Los Angeles to the size of Chicago, 18.9 million people would be displaced and per capita rural income would fall by 3.6%, due to diminishing returns to labor in less heavily populated areas.

2. The average reduction in real income per person, from this thought experiment, would be 3.4%.  You will note that NIMBY policies are in fact running a version of this policy, albeit at different margins and with a different default status quo point.

3. If you were to force America's 11 largest cities to be no larger than Miami, real income per American would fall by 7.9%.

4. If planning regulations were lifted entirely, NYC would reach about 40 million people, Philadelphia 38 million (that's a lot of objectionable sports fans!), and Boston just shy of 30 million (ditto).

5. Output per person, under that scenario, would rise in NYC by 5.7% and by 13.3% in Boston.  That said, under this same scenario incumbent New Yorkers would see net real consumption losses of 13%, whereas for Boston the incumbent losses are only about 1.1%.

6. The big winners are the new entrants.  On average, real income would rise by 25.7%.

7. Alternatively, in their model, rather than laissez-faire, if America's three most productive cities relaxed their planning regulations to the same level as the median U.S. city, real per capita income would rise by about 8.2%.

8. In all of these cases the authors calculate the change in rural per capita income, based on resulting population reallocations.