City age and city size

Kristian Giesen and Jens Suedekum

No 120, DICE Discussion Papers from Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf Institute for Competition Economics (DICE)

Abstract: There has been vast interest in the distribution of city sizes in an economy, but this research has largely neglected that cities also differ along another fundamental dimension: age. Using novel data on the foundation dates of more than 10,000 American cities, we find that older cities in the US tend to be larger than younger ones. To take this nexus between city age and city size into account, we introduce endogenous city creation into a dynamic economic model of an urban system. The city size distribution that emerges in our economy delivers a close fit to different types of US city size data. This evidence can resolve several recent debates, and build a bridge between different views in the literature on city size distributions.

Keywords: Zipf's law; Gibrat's 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: 2013
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-geo and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

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Related works:
Journal Article: City age and city size (2014)
Working Paper: City Age and City Size (2013)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:dicedp:120

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