The urban structures between the Member States of the European Union is very different for historical, geographical, economic reasons. However, the population is spread across geographic areas in a way that, although continuously changing, is not possible to define as random. Indeed, countries...

Several authors (Berry 1970, Krugman 1996 or Eaton and Eckstein 1997, among many others) have experienced amazement about the accurate functioning of the law of "least effort" established by Zipf (1949) in most places. Cities, ranked by population, seem to follow almost exactly a log/log...

The empirical regularity known as Zipf’s law or the rank-size rule has motivated development of a theoretical literature to explain it. We examine the assumptions on consumer behavior, particularly about their inability to insure against the city-level productivity shocks, implicitly used in...