Zipf’s law for Chinese cities: Rolling sample regressions

Guohua Peng

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, 2010, vol. 389, issue 18, 3804-3813

Abstract: We study the validity of Zipf’s Law in a data set of Chinese city sizes for the years 1999–2004, when the numbers of cities remain almost constant after a rapid urbanization process during the period of the market-oriented economy and reform-open policy. Previous investigations are restricted to log–log rank–size regression for a fixed sample. In contrast, we use rolling sample regression methods in which the sample is changing with the truncation point. The intuition is that if the distribution is Pareto with a coefficient one (Zipf’s law holds), rolling sample regressions should yield a constant coefficient regardless of what the sample is. We find that the Pareto exponent is almost monotonically decreasing in the truncation point; the mean estimated coefficient is 0.84 for the full dataset, which is not so far from 1.

Keywords: Chinese city size; Zipf’s law; Pareto distribution; Urban economic development; Rolling sample regressions (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:phsmap:v:389:y:2010:i:18:p:3804-3813

DOI: 10.1016/j.physa.2010.05.004

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