This paper uses un-truncated city population data from six countries (the United States, Spain, Italy, France, England and Japan) to illustrate how parametric growth regressions can lead to biased results when testing for Gibrat’s law in city size distributions. The OLS results show...

In this short paper we apply the methodology proposed by Ioannides and Overman (2003) to estimate a local Zipf exponent using data for the entire twentieth century of the complete distribution of cities (incorporated places) without any size restrictions in the US. The results reject Zipf’s...

This article analyzes the main existing theories on income and population city growth: the existence of increasing returns to scale, the importance of locational fundamentals, and random growth. To do this we develop a nonlinearity test that is implemented to a dataset on urban, climatological...

This paper analyses the growth of American cities, understood as the growth of the population or of the per capita income, from 1990 to 2000. This empirical analysis uses data from all the cities (incorporated places) with more than 25,000 inhabitants in the year 2000 (1152 cities). The results...

This paper uses un-truncated city population data from six countries (the United States, Spain, Italy, France, England and Japan) to illustrate how parametric growth regressions can lead to biased results when testing for Gibrat’s law in city size distributions. The OLS results show...

We study US city size distribution using places data from the Census, without size restrictions, for the period 1900-2010, and the recently constructed US City Clustering Algorithm (CCA) data for 1991 and 2000. We compare the lognormal, two distributions named after Ioannides and Skouras (2013)...

This paper analyses the performance of the graphs traditionally used to study size distributions: histograms, Zipf plots (double logarithmic graphs of rank compared to size) and plotted cumulative density functions. A lognormal distribution is fitted to urban data from three countries (the US,...

This paper analyses in detail the features offered by three distributions used in urban economics to describe city size distributions: lognormal, q-exponential and double Pareto lognormal, and another one of use in other areas of economics: the log-logistic. We use a large database which covers...

We study the US city size distribution using the Census places data, without size restriction, for the period (1900-2010). Also, we use the recently introduced US City Clustering Algorithm (CCA) data for 1991 and 2000. We compare the lognormal, two distributions named after Ioannides and Skouras...

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 from three countries (the US, Spain and Italy) for the entire twentieth century. In order to achieve this, we use different techniques. First,...