The aim of this work is to test empirically the validity of Gibrat’s law on the growth of cities, using data on the complete distribution of cities (without size restrictions) from three countries (the US, Spain and Italy) for the entire 20th century. In order to achieve this, different...

This paper presents a simple method for calculating deviations between actual city size and the size which would correspond to it with a Pareto exponent equal to one (Zipf's law). The results show two differentiated behaviours: most cities (80.25 per cent) present a greater size than that which...