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...

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...

We review the accumulated knowledge on city size distributions and determinants of urban growth. This topic is of interest because of a number of key stylized facts, including notably Zipf’s law for cities (which states that the number of cities of size greater than S is proportional to 1/S)...

This paper is about the city size and growth rate distributions as seen from the perspectives of Zipf's and Gibrat's law. We demonstrate that the Gibrat and Zipf views are theoretically incompatible in view of the Fisher-Tippett theorem, and show that the conflicting hypotheses about the size...

Previous work on the growth and location of communities has analyzed only one aspect of community growth at a time, either the location, growth, or birth of settlements. We use these three descriptive aspects of settlements to create a story that addresses when communities were created, where...

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...

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 this period. The main contribution of the paper is the parametric and...

This article analyzes the main existing theories on income and population city growth: the existence of increasing returns to scale, the importance of locational fundamentals, and random growth. To do this we develop a nonlinearity test that is implemented to a dataset on urban, climatological...

This paper documents the structural differences between climate change leading `actors' as Northern EU countries, and `lagging actors' - southern EU countries and the `Umbrella group' - with regard to their long run carbon-income relationships. We show that such categorization gives relevant...

This article analyzes empirically the main existing theories on income and population city growth: increasing returns to scale, locational fundamentals and random growth. To do this we implement a threshold nonlinearity test that extends standard linear growth regression models to a dataset on...