This paper introduces a new city-level panel dataset constructed using satellite nighttime light imagery and grid population data. The dataset contains over 1,500 cities covering 43 economies of Asia and the Pacific from 1992 to 2016. With the dataset, we perform a variety of analyses for Asia...

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...

The urban structures between the Member States of the European Union is very different for historical, geographical, economic reasons. However, the population is spread across geographic areas in a way that, although continuously changing, is not possible to define as random. Indeed, countries...

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...

There has been vast interest in the distribution of city sizes in an economy, but this research has largely neglected that cities also differ along another fundamental dimension: age. Using novel data on the foundation dates of more than 10,000 American cities, we find that older cities in the...