Zipf's Law for Cities in the Regions and the Country

By Kristian Giesen, Jens Suedekum. Social Science Research Network, 2011

161 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The salient rank-size rule known as Zipf's law is not only satisfied for Germany's national urban hierarchy, but also for the city size distributions in single German regions. To analyze this phenomenon, we build on the insights by Gabaix (1999) that Zipf's law follows from a stochastic growth process. In particular, Gabaix shows that if the regions follow Gibrat's law, we should observe Zipf at both the regional and the national level. This theory has never been addressed empirically. Using non-parametric techniques we find that Gibrat's law holds in each German region, irrespective of how "regions" are defined. In other words, Gibrat's law and therefore Zipf's law tend to hold everywhere in space.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8818f9c86a14924e7b5ed88639930862f0398cf6

Citations in the corpus

• What is Different About Urbanization in Rich and Poor Countries? Cities in Brazil, China, India and the United States (2017, unknown): “and Maré (2001), who found no relationship between real wages and area population across American metropolitan areas, and Glaeser and Gottlieb (2006) who found that a real wage premium existed in 1970 but not in 2000.”