This paper presents a tractable dynamic general equilibrium model of income and firm-size distributions. The size and value of firms result from idiosyncratic, firm-level productivity shocks. CEOs can invest in their own firms’ risky stocks or in risk-free assets, implying that the CEO’s...

The rank-size model - which states that the size distribution of cities in a country follows a Pareto distribution - has been recognized as one of those stylised facts or amazing empirical regularities, in spatial economics. A common problem in city size distribution studies concerns the...

European economic integration is commonly believed to be incomplete, and that further reforms are needed. In this context, the union of U.S. states is considered the benchmark of complete economic integration and is often the basis for comparison regarding the extent of E.U economic integration....

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...

We analyze the first data set on consistently defined functional urban areas in Europe and compare the European to the US urban system. City sizes in Europe do not follow a power law: the largest cities are “too small” to follow Zipf’s law.

European economic integration is commonly believed to be incomplete, and that further reforms are needed. In this context, the union of U.S. states is considered the benchmark of complete economic integration and is often the basis for comparison regarding the extent of E.U economic integration....