Zipfs Law for Cities: An Empirical Examination

Yannis Ioannides and Henry Overman

CEP Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Performance, LSE

Abstract: We use data for metro areas in the United States, from the US Census for 1900 û 1990, to test the validity of Zipf's Law for cities. Previous investigations are restricted to regressions of log size against log rank. In contrast, we use a nonparametric procedure to calculate local Zipf exponents from the mean and variance of city growth rates. This also allows us to test for the validity of Gibrat's Law for city growth processes. Despite variation in growth rates as a function of city size, Gibrat's Law does hold. In addition the local Zipf exponents are broadly consistent with Zipf's Law. Deviations from Zipf's Law are easily explained by deviations from Gibrat's Law.

Keywords: Urban growth; Zipfs Law; Gibrats Law; estimation of Brownian motion (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2000-11
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

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https://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/DP0484.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Zipf's law for cities: an empirical examination (2003)
Working Paper: Zipf’s law for cities: an empirical examination (2003)
Working Paper: Zipf's law for cities: an empirical examination (2000)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cep:cepdps:dp0484

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