New Evidence on Gibrat’s Law for Cities

Rafael González-Val, Luis Lanaspa () and Fernando Sanz

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: The aim of this work is to test empirically the validity of Gibrat’s Law in the growth of cities, using data for all the twentieth century of the complete distribution of cities (without any size restrictions) in three countries: the US, Spain and Italy. On considering the distribution of cities, we find a tendency to divergence. However, this fact does not impede, whether from an empirical or a theoretical point of view, that city size distribution can be adequately approximated with a lognormal distribution. Also, the conclusions which can be obtained as to fulfilment or not of Gibrat’s Law depend, first, on the sample size and, second, on the size of the cities being considered (large or small), which means that the results of any study which does not use all the distribution will be relative.

Keywords: Gibrat’s Law; city size distribution; urban growth (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C14 R00 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008-09-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-geo and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (13)

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https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/10411/1/MPRA_paper_10411.pdf original version (application/pdf)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/20169/1/MPRA_paper_20169.pdf revised version (application/pdf)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/23705/1/MPRA_paper_23705.pdf revised version (application/pdf)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/26924/1/MPRA_paper_26924.pdf revised version (application/pdf)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/43853/1/MPRA_paper_43853.pdf revised version (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: New evidence on Gibrat’s law for cities (2012)
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