Some foundations for Zipf's law: Product proliferation and local spillovers

By Gilles Duranton. 2006

111 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper embeds the canonical model of endogenous growth with product proliferation developed by Romer [Romer, P.M., 1990. Endogenous technical change. Journal of Political Economy 98, S71–S102] into a simple urban framework. This yields a reduced form isomorphic to the popular statistical device developed by Simon [Simon, H., 1955. On a class of skew distribution functions. Biometrika 42, 425–440], which in turn can yield Zipf's law for cities. The stochastic outcomes of purposeful innovation and local spillovers can thus serve as foundations for random growth models.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f672ceb5c026198c7a3c4b3466c8984b248f52f2

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In Economics and Econometrics

Citations in the corpus

The Growth of Cities (2013, unknown): “Duranton (2006, 2007) proposes two related economic mechanisms that lead to additive random growth.”
Cities, Skills and Regional Change (2014, unknown): “…theory of endogenous growth to incorporate urban dynamics and reconcile increasing returns at the local level with constant returns and a balanced growth path for the aggregate economy (EATON and ECKSTEIN, 1997; BLACK and HENDERSON, 1999; DURANTON, 2006, 2007; ROSSI-HANSBERG and WRIGHT, 2007).”
The Area and Population of Cities: New Insights from a Different Perspective on Cities (2010, unknown): “2004; Eeckhout 2004; Duranton 2006, 2007; Rossi-Hansberg and Wright 2007; Córdoba 2008): cities follow a proportional growth process where the distribution of the percentage growth rate is the same for small and large cities.”
CENTRAL PLACE T HEORY A ND CITY SIZE DISTRIBUTION (2012, unknown): “See Figure 6 for a depiction of the Ddeviation of a particular good.”
The Number Average Size Rule: A New Empirical Relationship between Industrial Location and City Size (2008, unknown): “Duranton, Gilles and Henry G. Overman.”
A theoretical framework for evolutionary economic geography: industrial dynamics and urban growth as a branching process (2007, methodology): “Rather, growth becomes dependent on the product competition between its products and 8 Note in this respect the commonalities of our approach with the spinoff model of Klepper and Sleeper (2005) and the urban growth model proposed by Duranton (2006).”