We examine the growth process of the largest cities in India for the post economic reform period 1991–2011 to analyze Gibrat’s and Zipf’s laws by applying nonparametric estimation. The results from stochastic kernel, contour plots, and expected growth rate and variance conditional on city...

We examine whether the size distribution and the growth process of the world’s largest cities follow Zipf’s law and Gibrat’s law. The parametric results of the size distribution analysis reject Zipf’s law for all sample sizes and also show the Zipf exponent systematically declines as the...

We examine the distributions of Chinese and Indian city sizes for seven decades (1950s to 2010s) using lognormal, Pareto, and general Pareto distributions. We ascertain which distribution fits the data and how the city size distributions change during these periods. The Chinese city size...