City age and city size

Kristian Giesen and Jens Suedekum

European Economic Review, 2014, vol. 71, issue C, 193-208

Abstract: Using novel data on the foundation dates of more than 10,000 American Census places, we show 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. Our model predicts a pattern of age-dependent urban growth that is in line with recently established empirical evidence. The size distribution that emerges in our economy delivers a close fit to different types of US data and it outperforms other suggested parametrizations. This evidence can resolve several 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; Urban growth (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O40 R11 R12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (26)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0014292114001196
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: City age and city size (2013)
Working Paper: City Age and City Size (2013)
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:eee:eecrev:v:71:y:2014:i:c:p:193-208

DOI: 10.1016/j.euroecorev.2014.07.006

Access Statistics for this article

European Economic Review is currently edited by T.S. Eicher, A. Imrohoroglu, E. Leeper, J. Oechssler and M. Pesendorfer

More articles in European Economic Review from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().