The size distribution across all "Cities": a unifying approach

Kristian Giesen and Jens Suedekum

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: Older cities in the US tend to be larger than younger ones. The distribution of city sizes is, therefore, systematically related to the country's city age distribution. We introduce endogenous city creation into a dynamic economic model of an urban system. All cities exhibit the same long-run growth rate (Gibrat's law), but young cities initially grow faster. The double Pareto lognormal (DPLN) emerges as the city size distribution in our model. The DPLN unifies the lognormal and the Pareto distribution (Zipf's law), and closely fits US city size data. This evidence can potentially resolve several debates from the recent literature.

Keywords: Zipf's law; Gibrat's law; city size distributions; city age; DPLN distribution (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: N0 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 25 pages
Date: 2012-12
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/59252/ Open access version. (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: The Size Distribution Across All 'Cities': A Unifying Approach (2012)
Working Paper: The Size Distribution across all "Cities": A Unifying Approach (2012)
Working Paper: The size distribution across all “cities”: a unifying approach (2012)
Working Paper: The Size Distribution Across All “Cities”: A Unifying Approach (2012)
Working Paper: The size distribution across all 'cities': A unifying approach (2012)
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:ehl:lserod:59252

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library LSE Library Portugal Street London, WC2A 2HD, U.K.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by LSERO Manager ().