July 2004
Intermediate to advanced
1082 pages
39h 18m
English
Content preview from Handbook of Regional and Urban Economics
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Chapter 53
The Evolution of City Size Distributions
Xavier Gabaix xgabaix@mit.edu MIT and NBER, USA. MIT and NBER. USA
Yannis M. Ioannides yannis.ioannides@tufts.edu Tufts University, USA. Tufts University. USA
JEL classification: C2, N9, R1
Abstract
We review the accumulated knowledge on city size distributions and determinants of urban growth. This topic is of interest because of a number of key stylized facts, including notably Zipf’s law for cities (which states that the number of cities of size greater than S is proportional to 1/S) and the importance of urban primacy. We first review the empirical evidence on the upper tail of city size distribution. We offer a novel discussion of the important econometric issues in the characterization ...