Gibrat's Law for Cities: Evidence From World War I Casualties

Antonio Ciccone ()

CRC TR 224 Discussion Paper Series from University of Bonn and University of Mannheim, Germany

Abstract: According to Gibrat's law for cities, population shocks have permanent effects on city size. I examine this implication by analyzing the persistence of observed population shocks: German military casualties in WWI by municipality of birth. I find a strong negative effect of military casualties on the male population of municipalities just after WWI. This effect persists to 1933 and, outside of the most agricultural municipalities, beyond. The effect on female population and the number of households is similar to the effect on male population by 1950, when women in the generation that fought in WWI started reaching their life expectancy.

Pages: 41
Date: 2021-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ure
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.crctr224.de/research/discussion-papers/archive/dp286 (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:bon:boncrc:crctr224_2021_286

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CRC TR 224 Discussion Paper Series from University of Bonn and University of Mannheim, Germany Kaiserstr. 1, 53113 Bonn , Germany.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CRC Office ().