Size distributions for all cities: Which one is best?

By Rafael González‐Val, Arturo Ramos, F. Sanz-Gracia, María Vera-Cabello. Papers in Regional Science, 2013

60 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper analyses four statistical distributions used to describe city size distributions: lognormal, double Pareto lognormal, q‐exponential, and log‐logistic. We use un‐truncated city size data for the US, Spain and Italy from 1900 until 2010, and, in addition, the last available year for the remaining countries of the OECD. We estimate the four functions by maximum likelihood. To check the goodness of the fit we use the Kolmogorov‐Smirnov and Cramér‐von Mises tests, and compute the Akaike information criterion and Bayesian information criterion. The results show that the distribution which best fits data in most of the cases (86.76%) is the double Pareto lognormal.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4ad397542893ff94021b9cb2010abf2dc6a56fde

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In Economics and Econometrics

1. Jens Südekum
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Citations in the corpus

• City Age and City Size (2014, background): “It is straightforward to show from (14) that xj(t) = x−j(t) = 0, so that the total mass of cities stays fixed at some initial level N0.”