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countries. In terms of population, we find that Zipf's law holds for many, but not all, countries. Contrasting the distribution … of population with the distribution of economic activity, measured by nighttime lights, across cities we shed light on …
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012428850
In this paper, I provide a quantitative review of the empirical literature on Zipf's law for cities; the meta-analysis combines 515 estimates from 29 studies. I find that the combined estimate of the Zipf coefficient is significantly larger than 1.0. This finding implies that cities are on...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010306531
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 examination...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10011340829
, economic reasons. However, the population is spread across geographic areas in a way that, although continuously changing, is … not possible to define as random. Indeed, countries have faced a strong tendency toward agglomeration, namely population … coefficient, the more even the population of cities in the urban system. There are several potential explanations for variations …
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10011399955
It has long been known that the city-size distributions are fat tailed, drawing the interest of urban economists. In contrast, not much is known about the distribution of GDP at city level (henceforth referred to as gross metropolitan product, GMP). We build a model of the spatial economy that...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10011400314
We analyze the first data set on consistently defined functional urban areas in Europe and compare the European to the US urban system. City sizes in Europe do not follow a power law: the largest cities are ?too small? to follow Zipf?s law.
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10011400462
We first demonstrate that, within a fully integrated economy (FIE) in which there is free mobility of goods and factors, each FIE member's share of total FIE output will equal its shares of the total FIE stock of each productive factor. This equal-share property implies that, if economic...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010325479
There has been vast interest in the distribution of city sizes in an economy, but this research has largely neglected that cities also differ along another fundamental dimension: age. Using novel data on the foundation dates of more than 10,000 American cities, we find that older cities in the...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010327198
registered by individuals is analysed. The penetration rate over the relevant population of potential adopters is computed at … geographical distribution of Internet is less concentrated than population and income suggesting a diffusive effect. Regression …
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010328436
The empirical regularity known as Zipf's law or the rank-size rule has motivated development of a theoretical literature to explain it. We examine the assumptions on consumer behavior, particularly about their inability to insure against the city-level productivity shocks, implicitly used in...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10011599674