Zipf's law for cities: a cross-country investigation

Volume: 35, Issue: 3, Pages: 239 - 263
Published: May 1, 2005
Abstract
null null This paper assesses the empirical validity of Zipf's Law for cities, using new data on 73 countries and two estimation methods—OLS and the Hill estimator. With either estimator, we reject Zipf's Law far more often than we would expect based on random chance; for 53 out of 73 countries using OLS, and for 30 out of 73 countries using the Hill estimator. The OLS estimates of the Pareto exponent are roughly normally distributed, but those...
Paper Details
Title
Zipf's law for cities: a cross-country investigation
Published Date
May 1, 2005
Volume
35
Issue
3
Pages
239 - 263
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