It is hard to overestimate the scholarly impact of Saskia Sassen's theorising on the 'global city', which revolves around the impact of economic globalisation on the social, economic, and political reality of cities in advanced 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 theorising on the global city for interpreting urban change, while neglecting to systematically assess the empirical validity of this theoretical framework. In order to enable rigorous empirical scrutiny, Van der Waal unravels the global city debate into various distinct theoretical propositions, and relates these to competing theoretical notions of Richard Florida, Edward Glaeser, Chris Hamnett, and others. The resulting fresh hypotheses are tested by using data on one of the most urbanised and globalised developed economies in the world: the Netherlands during the 1990s and 2000s. By doing so, the author demonstrates that the standard research practice in the global city debate leaves much to be desired, for it yields both an under- and overestimation of the impact of economic globalisation on urban labour markets in contemporary cities in advanced economies.