The unexpected increase in the number of census towns (CTs) in the last census has thrust them into the spotlight. Using a hitherto unexploited dataset, it is found that many of the new CTs satisfied the requisite criteria in 2001 itself; mitigating concerns of inflated urbanisation. The new CTs...

This paper examines the spatial interaction of neighboring cities over their employment cycles. The cycles of neighboring cities tend to be more similar to one another than are those of non-neighboring cities, although this is due primarily to neighbors' tendency to be in the same state. In...

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...

I begin with a rough sketch of the incidence of the cultural economy in US cities today. I then offer a brief review of some theoretical approaches to the question of creativity, with special reference to issues of social and geographic context. The city is a powerful fountainhead of creativity,...

After the intense and unprecedented urbanisation of the last centuries, it is more than evident that a clear understanding of the ongoing trends of urban growth and clustering is needed if we are to aim for a better insight as to their possible future. The main aim of this paper is the...

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...

Previous studies have found a strong positive correlation between human capital, measured as the share of the adult population with a college degree, and population growth in metropolitan statistical areas (MSA) in the U.S. In this paper, I corroborate that the human capital-growth connection is...

Three urban growth theories predict parallel growth of cities. The endogenous growth theory predicts deterministic parallel growth; the random growth theory implies that city growth follows Gibrat’s law with a steady-state distribution; and the hybrid growth theory suggests the co-movement of...

The aim of this work is to test empirically the validity of Gibrat’s Law in the growth of cities, using data for all the twentieth century of the complete distribution of cities (without any size restrictions) in three countries: the US, Spain and Italy. On considering the distribution of...

This paper analyses the evolution of the size distribution of cities in the United States throughout the 20th century. In particular, we are interested in testing the fulfilment of two empirical regularities studied in urban economics: Zipf’s law, which postulates that the product between rank...