A Comparative Analysis of Gibrat s and Zipf s Law on Urban Population

Marco Modica, Aura Reggiani () and Peter Nijkamp

Working Papers from Dipartimento Scienze Economiche, Universita' di Bologna

Abstract: The regional economics and geography literature on urban population size has in recent years shown interesting conceptual and methodological contributions on the validity of Gibrat s Law and Zipf s Law. Despite distinct modeling features, they express similar fundamental characteristics in an equilibrium situation. Zipf s law is formalized in a static form, while its associated dynamic process is articulated by Gibrat s Law. Thus, it is likely that both Zipf s Law and Gibrat s Law share a common root. Unfortunately, empirical investigations on the direct relationship between Gibrat s Law and Zipf s Law are rather rare and not conclusive. The present paper aims to answer the question whether (a generalisation of) Gibrat s Law allows us to infer Zipf s Law, and vice versa? In our conceptual and applied framework, particular attention will be paid to the role of the mean and the variance of city population as key indicators for assessing the (non-) validity of the generalised Gibrat s Law. Our empirical experiments are based on a comparative analysis between the dynamics of the urban population of four countries with entirely mutually contrasting spatial-economic and geographic characteristics: Botswana, Germany, Hungary and Luxembourg. We arrive at the following results: if (i) the mean is independent of city size (first necessary condition of Gibrat s law) and (ii) the coefficient of the rank-size rule/Zipf s Law is different from one, then the variance is dependent on city size.

JEL-codes: C46 D30 O40 R11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-geo, nep-hme and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://amsacta.unibo.it/4270/1/WP1008.pdf (application/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:bol:bodewp:wp1008

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Dipartimento Scienze Economiche, Universita' di Bologna Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Dipartimento Scienze Economiche, Universita' di Bologna ().