Uneven landscapes and the city size distribution

Sanghoon Lee () and Qiang Li
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Sanghoon Lee: University of British Columbia

No 2010/41, Working Papers from Institut d'Economia de Barcelona (IEB)

Abstract: This paper proposes a new explanation for Zipf’s law often observed in the top tail of city size distribution. We show that Zipf’s law can emerge if city size can be expressed as a product of multiple random factors. Each of the factors need not generate Zipf’s law by itself. The key implication is that we cannot reject a model simply because the model does not generate Zipf’s law. A single model, typically representing only one factor, may not generate Zipf’s law, but if we have many such models together as in reality, Zipf’s law may emerge.

Keywords: City size distribution; Zipf’s law; rank-size rule; log-normal distribution (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D39 R12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 27 pages
Date: 2010
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Related works:
Journal Article: Uneven landscapes and city size distributions (2013)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ieb:wpaper:doc2010-41

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