(Bloomberg Business) — Limited housing is keeping workers away from the cities where they could be most productive, and that's costing the economy. 

Reducing land-use constraints in high-productivity New York, San Francisco and San Jose to the level of the median city would expand their labor forces, boosting U.S. gross domestic product by 9.5 percent, according to estimates from a new study by the University of California at Berkeley's Enrico Morettiand the University of Chicago's Chang-Tai Hsieh. 

"A limited number of American workers can have access to these very high-productivity cities," Moretti said in an interview. A more efficient distribution would be "a general benefit for the entire economy."

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