A ubiquitous feature of life in peripheral communities is that school leavers have to move away to attend further and higher education. From the point of view of an individual student and his family significant amounts have to be spent to pay for term time costs. These are at least partially...

Exploiting the cascade structure of cities and based on a dataset for U.S. cities between 1840 and 2016, the aim of this short paper is to answer three important questions: First, do we observe that the U.S. city size distribution exhibits a smooth transition to Zipf's law from the beginning or...

Exploiting the cascade structure of cities and based on a dataset for U.S. cities between 1840 and 2016, the aim of this short paper is to answer three important questions: First, do we observe that the U.S. city size distribution exhibits a smooth transition to Zipf's law from the beginning or...

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...