The distribution of urban population and economic activity in the European Union and the United States

Miguel Puente-Ajovín, Marcos Sanso-Navarro and María Vera-Cabello ()
Additional contact information
Miguel Puente-Ajovín: Universidad de Zaragoza
María Vera-Cabello: Centro Universitario de la Defensa de Zaragoza

Letters in Spatial and Resource Sciences, 2022, vol. 15, issue 3, No 13, 517-522

Abstract: Abstract This letter compares the distribution of urban population and economic activity in the European Union and the United States. Economic activity, proxied with nighttime lights, is more unevenly distributed than population, especially in the European Union. This reflects that more population does not necessarily imply a higher level of economic activity. Both Zipf’s law and a Pareto distribution are rejected for aggregate nighttime lights within urban extents. Therefore, alternative specifications are required for the distribution of city sizes in terms of economic activity.

Keywords: City size distribution; Zipf’s law; Population; Nighttime lights (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O18 O57 R12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s12076-022-00309-5 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:lsprsc:v:15:y:2022:i:3:d:10.1007_s12076-022-00309-5

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/12076

DOI: 10.1007/s12076-022-00309-5

Access Statistics for this article

Letters in Spatial and Resource Sciences is currently edited by Henk Folmer and Amitrajeet A. Batabyal

More articles in Letters in Spatial and Resource Sciences from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().