No two ways about it: the soccer World Cup competition in June 2006 in Germany was a great experience, not only for the soccer fans, and it still resonates far and wide. The various commentaries have all concluded that the economic effects were positive. Emphasis has often been placed on...

An avalanche of empirical studies has addressed the validity of the rank-size rule (or Zipf's law) in a multi-city context in many countries. City size in most countries seems to obey Zipf's law, but the question under which conditions (e.g. sample size, spatial scale) this 'law' holds remained...