The Size Distribution Across All 'Cities': A Unifying Approach

Kristian Giesen and Jens Suedekum

SERC Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Performance, LSE

Abstract: Older cities in the US tend to be larger than younger ones. The distribution of city sizes is, therefore, systematically related to the country's city age distribution. We introduce endogenous city creation into a dynamic economic model of an urban system. All cities exhibit the same long-run growth rate (Gibrat's law), but young cities initially grow faster. The double Pareto lognormal (DPLN) emerges as the city size distribution in our model. The DPLN unifies the lognormal and the Pareto distribution (Zipf's law), and closely fits US city size data. This evidence can potentially resolve several debates from the recent literature.

Keywords: Zipfs law; Gibrats law; city size distributions; city age; DPLN distribution (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: R11 R12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ure
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

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http://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/sercdp0122.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: The Size Distribution across all "Cities": A Unifying Approach (2012)
Working Paper: The size distribution across all "Cities": a unifying approach (2012)
Working Paper: The size distribution across all “cities”: a unifying approach (2012)
Working Paper: The Size Distribution Across All “Cities”: A Unifying Approach (2012)
Working Paper: The size distribution across all 'cities': A unifying approach (2012)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cep:sercdp:0122

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