The empirical urban sprawl literature uses the closed city urban model in which population and income are exogenous. This paper considers the open city model with endogenous population and income as an alternative. The tests for single-county urbanized areas over 1970-2010 support the open over closed city models. While point estimates differ for open city instrumental variable (IV) models when compared with closed city OLS counterparts, the open city models offer broad empirical support for the underlying neoclassical urban land use theory. In that regard, support for the theory found in the existing empirical literature using closed city models is not likely to diminish when using empirically preferred open city models.

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