Three urban growth theories predict parallel growth of cities. The endogenous growth theory predicts deterministic parallel growth; the random growth theory implies that city growth follows Gibrat's law with a steady-state distribution; and the hybrid growth theory suggests the co-movement of...

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...

Accumulation of education and geographic concentration of educated people in cities are expected to generate urban income growth. New economic geography predicts income divergence across regions. We investigate the dynamic process of accumulating tertiary education and regional income growth in...

This paper studies urban growth in Korean cities. First, I document that population growth patterns change over time and that the current population distribution supports random urban growth. I confirm two empirical laws-Zipf's law and Gibrat's law-both of which hold in the period of 1995-2015,...

We consider a microfounded urban growth model with two regions and a mass of mobile workers to study interactions among growth, agglomeration, and urban congestion. Unlike previous research in the urban growth literature, we formulate the model as a one-shot game and take an evolutionary...

This appendix presents evidence that the US size and growth data sets analyzed in the main body of the paper are consistent with the stylized facts of (i) Zipf's law in city size distribution tails; (ii) Lognormality of city size distribution bodies; (iii) Gibrat's law (approximately) for the...

I develop an explanation of Zipf's law that is consistent with the observed marked heterogeneity in the growth of US cities. The explanation is that heterogeneous growth results in heterogeneous size distributions across cities, with the heaviest tailed distributions being Zipf and dominating...

The optimal size of an urban area is a controversial topic. We take optimal urban size to be that which minimizes net costs of city size, with larger cities first having various economies of scale (e.g. waste pickup) then later diseconomies of scale (e.g. pollution, congestion)

This paper analyses the growth of American cities, understood as the growth of the population or of the per capita income, from 1990 to 2000. This empirical analysis uses data from all the cities (incorporated places) with more than 25,000 inhabitants in the year 2000 (1152 cities). The results...

Cities and towns are loci of population and production. In 2010, 80.7 percent of the United States population resided in urban areas, and the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis reported that in 2011, 90.1 percent of GDP was produced in metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs), emphasizing that urban...