City Age and City Size

Jens Südekum and Kristian Giesen
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Jens Suedekum

VfS Annual Conference 2013 (Duesseldorf): Competition Policy and Regulation in a Global Economic Order from Verein für Socialpolitik / German Economic Association

Abstract: There has been vast interest in the distribution of city sizes in an economy, but this research has largely neglected that cities also diff er along another fundamental dimension: age. Using novel data on the foundation dates of almost 8,000 American cities, we fi nd that older cities in the US tend to be larger than younger ones. To take this nexus between city age and city size into account, we introduce endogenous city creation into a dynamic economic model of an urban system. The city size distribution that emerges in our economy delivers an excellent and robust fit to diff erent types of US city size data, in fact much better than other parameterizations derived from diff erent urban growth models. This evidence can resolve several recent debates, and build a bridge between different views in the literature on city size distributions.

JEL-codes: R10 R11 R12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
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 (9)

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Related works:
Journal Article: City age and city size (2014)
Working Paper: City age and city size (2013)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:vfsc13:79996

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