Several economic phenomena are found to follow an approximate Pareto distribution, at least in the upper tail. The debate is well established for the distribution of wealth and business firms, and has recently been particularly animated with respect to city sizes. In this paper we contribute to...

We question the claim that the largest US cities are Pareto distributed. We show that results of multiple tests on real data are similar to those obtained when the true distribution is lognormal, and largely depend on sample sizes.