Pareto tails and lognormal body of US cities size distribution

Luckstead, Jeff; Devadoss, Stephen

doi:10.1016/j.physa.2016.08.061

Cited by 49 publications

(35 citation statements)

References 22 publications

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“…The rank-size distribution does not hold true for extremely small or extremely large sizes of settlement, which is in accordance with previous studies (Gabaix 1999b;Newman 2005). Although Eeckhout (2004) argues that the entire distribution of city sizes is lognormal, studies by authors that affirm that the distribution of city sizes have a Pareto tail and a lognormal body (Bee, Riccaboni & Schiavo 2011Clauset, Shalizi & Newman 2009;Ioannides and Skouras, 2013;Luckstead and Devadoss, 2017;Malavergne, Pisarenko & Sornette 2011) are consistent with our results. Our study follows the study of Fazio and Modica (2015), which examined alternative city size distributions depending on differing truncation points and proved the validity of Eeckhout's (2009) study, stating that the choice of Pareto or lognormal distribution depends on the truncation point, wherein the upper tail is longer than assumed.…”

Section: Resultssupporting

confidence: 91%

Reconsidering Zipf’s law for regional development: The case of settlements and cities in Croatia

Jošić

Bašić

2018

Miscellanea Geographica

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Zipf’s law is a striking regularity in the field of urban economics that states that the sizes of cities should follow the rank-size distribution. Rank-size distribution, or the rank-size rule, is a commonly observed statistical relationship between the population size and population rank of a nations’ cities. The goal of this paper is to test Zipf’s law as applied to data for settlements and cities in Croatia using the Census of Population Survey for the year 2011. The results of the analysis have shown that Zipf’s law for settlements in Croatia holds true for the majority of the settlement sizes. However, the rank-size distribution does not hold true for extremely small and extremely large settlement sizes. When city proper and urban agglomeration of 127 Croatian cities were examined, Zipf’s law was found to hold true only for urban agglomerations. The results of the study are discussed in terms of regional development.

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Section: Resultssupporting

confidence: 91%

Reconsidering Zipf’s law for regional development: The case of settlements and cities in Croatia

Jošić

Bašić

2018

Miscellanea Geographica

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“…Looking for a good fitting of city size distribution in the lower and middle part of the size has been the object of a number of recent papers [21,34,53,54,55,65,66,67,79,80]. The conclusion that can be extracted from these accurate simulations based on real data of large countries (mostly India and Unites States) is that lognormal distribution and its variants provides an accurate description of the middle part (in agreement with the claim of Eechout [40]).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 66%

Size distribution of cities: A kinetic explanation

Gualandi

Toscani

2019

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications

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We present a kinetic approach to the formation of urban agglomerations which is based on simple rules of immigration and emigration. In most cases, the Boltzmanntype kinetic description allows to obtain, within an asymptotic procedure, a Fokker-Planck equation with variable coefficients of diffusion and drift, which describes the evolution in time of some probability density of the city size. It is shown that, in dependence of the microscopic rules of migration, the equilibrium density can follow both a power law for large values of the size variable, which contains as particular case a Zipf's law behavior, and a lognormal law for middle and low values of the size variable. In particular, connections between the value of Pareto index of the power law at equilibrium and the disposal of the population to emigration are outlined. The theoretical findings are tested with recent data of the populations of Italy and Switzerland.

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“…Furthermore, the analysis of data in point 2 has connections with the contributions of Loannides, Overman (2003), Nitsch (2005), Newman (2005), Giesen et al (2010), Gómez-Déniz et al (2014), Gómez-Déniz, Calderín-Ojeda (2015), Shujuan (2016), Luckstead, Devadoss (2017), that tried to find the best distributions to fit better the frequency of cities by size. Actually, although deserving further attention in future works, point 2 shows that Pareto distributions seem to fit most countries of the sample, Log normal distributions are better for countries with remote and small cities and a combination of distributions are the outcome of situations when first cities empty second ones.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Cordoba (2008) shows that the profile of the Zipf curve comes from the regularity of the growth process across cities. Many authors test the validity of different distributions to explain the population size of the cities (Loannides, Overman 2003, Nitsch 2005, Newman 2005, Giesen et al 2010, Gómez-Déniz et al 2014, Gómez-Déniz, Calderín-Ojeda 2015, Shujuan 2016, Luckstead, Devadoss 2017.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Urban Concentration and Spatial Allocation of Rents from natural resources. A Zipf's Curve Approach

Dentinho

2017

REGION

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Abstract. This paper aims at demonstrating how countries' dependency on natural resources plays a crucial role in urban concentration. The Zipf curve elasticity is estimated for a group of countries and related to a set of indicators of unilateral transferences. Results show that in comparison to others, countries with higher urban concentration explained by higher Zipf curve elasticity have a higher percentage of income coming from natural resources and education expenditures whereas public spending in health and net outflow of foreign direct investment seem to have spatial redistribution effects. Summing up, there are signs that the spatial allocation of property rights over natural resources and related rents influences urban concentration.

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Pareto tails and lognormal body of US cities size distribution

Cited by 49 publications

References 22 publications

Reconsidering Zipf’s law for regional development: The case of settlements and cities in Croatia

Reconsidering Zipf’s law for regional development: The case of settlements and cities in Croatia

Size distribution of cities: A kinetic explanation

Urban Concentration and Spatial Allocation of Rents from natural resources. A Zipf's Curve Approach

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