This paper reconsiders the evolution of the growth of American cities since 1790 in 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 sizes...

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. For this we use different techniques...

This paper analyses in detail the features offered by a function which is practically new to Urban Economics, the q-exponential, in describing city size distributions. We highlight two contributions. First, we propose a new and simple procedure for estimating their parameters. Second, and more...

This paper analyses the determinants of growth of American cities, understood as growth of the population or of per capita income, from 1990 to 2000. This empirical analysis uses data from all cities with more than 25,000 inhabitants in the year 2000 (1154 cities). The results show that while a...

This paper studies the effect of the Spanish Reconquest, a military campaign that aimed to expel the Muslims from the Iberian Peninsula, on the population of its most important cities. The almost four centuries of Reconquest offer a "quasi-natural" experiment to study the persistence of...

This paper aims to study the effect of a major historical event on the Spanish city size distribution, the Spanish Reconquista. This was a long military campaign that aimed to expel Muslims from the Iberian Peninsula. The process started in the early 1200s and ended around 1500, when the entire...

We provide empirical evidence of the dynamics of city size distribution for the whole of the twentieth century in U.S. cities and metropolitan areas. We focus our analysis on the new cities that were created during the period of analysis. The main contribution of this paper, therefore, is the...