Zipf's Law for Cities in the Regions and the Country

Kristian Giesen and Jens Suedekum

No 3928, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: The salient rank-size rule known as Zipf's law is not only satisfied for Germany's national urban hierarchy, but also for the city size distributions in single German regions. To analyze this phenomenon, we build on the insights by Gabaix (1999) that Zipf's law follows from a stochastic growth process. In particular, Gabaix shows that if the regions follow Gibrat's law, we should observe Zipf at both the regional and the national level. This theory has never been addressed empirically. Using non-parametric techniques we find that Gibrat's law holds in each German region, irrespective of how "regions" are defined. In other words, Gibrat's law and therefore Zipf's law tend to hold everywhere in space.

Keywords: rank-size rule; Gibrat's law; city size distributions; city growth; Zipf's law (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O4 R11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 24 pages
Date: 2009-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-geo
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Published - published in: Journal of Economic Geography, 2011, 11 (4), 667-686

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp3928.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Zipf's law for cities in the regions and the country (2011)
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:iza:izadps:dp3928

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().