Gibrat's Law for (All) Cities : A Rejoinder

We establish that the debate between Eeckhout (2004; 2009) and Levy (2009) has still not resolved the key issue of whether the distribution of large US urban places in 2000 is consistent with a lognormal for the entire size range. We resolve this by introducing a new distribution function which switches between a lognormal and a power distribution and estimating it with the data used by Eeckhout and Levy (2009). We find that there is a sudden transition from lognormality to power behavior as city populations increase above 100,000. Gibrat's law holds for most cities but a power law holds for most of the population