US city size distribution: Robustly Pareto, but only in the tail

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The Growth of Cities (2013, unknown): “In the same spirit, Ioannides and Skouras (2013) estimate a variety of log-normal and Pareto shapes allowing for some switching between them or a mixture of both.”
City Age and City Size (2014, background): “The former dataset refers to the year 2000 and 4Relatedly, some authors (most notably Levy 2009, Ioannides and Skouras 2013, and Malevergne, Pisarenko and Sornette 2011) have argued that the large Census places also follow a Zipfian power law pattern that is only imperfectly captured by the LN…”
Size distributions for all cities: Which one is best? (2013, background): “It seems that the discussion raised by Levy (2009) has been solved: “most cities obey a lognormal; but the upper tail and therefore most of the population obeys a Pareto law” (Ioannides and Skouras, 2013).”
Growth in a Cross-section of Cities: Location, Increasing Returns or Random Growth? (2015, unknown): “Curiously, the threshold level we find with our nonlinear growth model is similar to one of the switching points estimated by Ioannides & Skouras (2013).”