It is Hard to Overestimate the Influence of Saskra Sassen's global city theorizing focused on the impact of economic globalization on urban economies. Yet more than two decades of research dedicated to a 'global city debate' have left its main issues unresolved, In The Global City Debate Reconsidered Jeroen van der Waal argues that this is because scholars have hitherto merely used global city theorizing for interpreting urban change, while neglecting to systematically assess its empirical validity. As to enable rigorous empirical scrutiny. Van der Waal dissects the global city debate into distinct theoretical propositions and relates these to competing ones of Richard Florida and others. The resulting fresh hypotheses are tested by using data on cities in one of the most globalized developed economies, the author demonstrates that the standard research practice in the global city debate in highly unsatisfactory, for it yield both an under-and overestimation of the impact of economic globalization on urban labour markets in advanced economies.