City size distributions are known to be well approximated by power laws across many countries. One popular explanation for such power-law regularities is in terms of random growth processes, where power laws arise asymptotically from the assumption of iid growth rates among all cities within a...

This chapter on urbanization and growth focuses on modeling and empirical evidence that pertain to a number of inter-related questions. Why do cities form in an economy, with so much of economic activity in countries geographically concentrated in cities? Second, how do different types of cities...

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...

The regional economics and geography literature on urban population size has in recent years shown interesting conceptual and methodological contributions on the validity of Gibrat's Law and Zipf's Law. Despite distinct modeling features, they express similar fundamental characteristics in an...