This paper examines Gibrat's law in England and Wales between 1801 and 1911 using a unique data set covering the entire settlement size distribution. We find that Gibrat's law broadly holds even in the face of population doubling every fifty years, an industrial and transport trevolution, and...

This chapter describes how the spatial distribution of economic activity changes as economies develop and grow. We start with the relation between development and rural–urban migration. Moving beyond the coarse rural–urban distinction, we then focus on the continuum of locations in an...