Historical urban growth in Europe (1300–1800)

Rafael González-Val

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: This paper analyses the evolution of the European urban system from a long-term perspective (from 1300 to 1800). Using the method recently proposed by Clauset, Shalizi, and Newman (2009), a Pareto-type city size distribution (power law) is rejected from 1300 to 1600. A power law is a plausible model for the city size distribution only in 1700 and 1800, although the log-normal distribution is another plausible alternative model that we cannot reject. Moreover, the random growth of cities is rejected using parametric and non-parametric methods. The results reveal a clear pattern of convergent growth in all the periods.

Keywords: city size distribution; power law; Pareto distribution; Zipf’s law; Gibrat’s law (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C12 C14 R11 R12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017-07-28
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-geo, nep-gro, nep-his and nep-ure
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https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/80475/1/MPRA_paper_80475.pdf original version (application/pdf)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/83096/1/MPRA_paper_83096.pdf revised version (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Historical urban growth in Europe (1300–1800) (2019)
Working Paper: Historical urban growth in Europe (1300–1800) (2016)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:80475

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