The Rise & Fall of Urban Concentration in Britain: Zipf, Gibrat and Gini across two centuries

Ronan Lyons () and Elisa Maria Tirindelli ()
Additional contact information
Elisa Maria Tirindelli: Department of Economics, Trinity College Dublin

Economic Papers from Trinity College Dublin, Economics Department

Abstract: While city size and growth are the subject of a substantial literature, consensus is lacking on the extent to which Zipf's Law or Gibrat's Law holds across space and time. We examine city size, rank and growth in Britain 1801-2011 and show conclusions depend on city definition, sample cutoff and regression methods. We find Zipf's Law cannot be rejected under the strongest combination of data and methods, unlike if other data or methods are used. Across Zipf, Gibrat and Gini analyses, we find that urban concentration in Britain peaked in the mid-19th century but fell 1861-1911 and 1951-1991.

Keywords: Great Britain; Zipf's Law; urban growth; Gibrat's Law (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: N9 O18 R11 R12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 54 pages
Date: 2022-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-geo, nep-his and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.tcd.ie/Economics/TEP/2022/TEP0522.pdf

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:tcd:tcduee:tep0522

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Economic Papers from Trinity College Dublin, Economics Department Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Colette Angelov ().