City size distribution and space

Rafael González-Val

No 2017/18, Working Papers from Institut d'Economia de Barcelona (IEB)

Abstract: We study the US city size distribution over space. This paper makes two contributions to the empirical literature on city size distributions. First, this study uses data from different definitions of US cities in 2010 to study the distribution of cities in space, finding significant patterns of dispersion depending on city size. Second, the paper proposes a new distance-based approach to analyse the influence of distance on the city size distribution parameters, considering both the Pareto and lognormal distributions. By using all possible combinations of cities within a 300-mile radius, results indicate that the Pareto distribution cannot be rejected in most of the cases regardless of city size. Placebo regressions validate our results, thereby confirming the significant effect of geography on the Pareto exponent.

Keywords: Space; city size distribution; distance-based approach; Pareto distribution; Zipf’s law; lognormal distribution (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C12 C14 R11 R12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 46 pages
Date: 2017
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ure
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Related works:
Journal Article: US city-size distribution and space (2019)
Working Paper: US city size distribution and space (2018)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ieb:wpaper:doc2017-18

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