This paper presents an essay on empirical testing procedure for economic convergence. Referring to the unit root test proposed by Moon and Perron (2004), we proposed a modified Evans (1996)testing procedure of the convergence hypothesis. The advantage of this modified procedure is that it makes...

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...

This paper reconsiders the evolution of the growth of American cities since 1790 in the light of new theories of urban growth. Our null hypothesis for long-term growth is random growth. We obtain evidence supporting random growth against the alternative of mean reversion (convergence) in city...

Cluster policy has become a method of choice for economic policymakers in many nations and regions in both industrialized and developing countries. Since the beginning of the 1990s, the policy is being perceived by politicians and practitioners as a way to anchor economic activity in locations...

This paper examines the role of mechanical refrigeration in temporal and spatial price relationships for regional egg markets in the United States, 1880–1911. Notably, this period encompasses an era in which widespread adoption of mechanical refrigeration greatly impacted the ability to...

Determining whether per capita output can be characterized by a stochastic trend is complicated by the fact that infrequent breaks in trend can bias standard unit root tests towards non-rejection of the unit root hypothesis. The bulk of the existing literature has focused on the application of...

This work presents a simple method for calculating deviations regarding city size and the size which would correspond to it with a Pareto exponent equal to one unit (Zipf’s Law). Recent works show that when considering the entire sample without size restrictions, the estimated Pareto exponent...

Zipf’s law is one of the best-known empirical regularities of the city-size distribution. There is extensive research on the subject, where each city is treated symmetrically in terms of the cost of transactions with other cities. Recent developments in network theory facilitate the...

Zipf’s law is one of the best-known empirical regularities in urban economics. There is extensive research on the subject, where each city is treated symmetrically in terms of the cost of transactions with other cities. Recent developments in network theory facilitate the examination of an...

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...