Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/120643 
Year of Publication: 
2012
Series/Report no.: 
52nd Congress of the European Regional Science Association: "Regions in Motion - Breaking the Path", 21-25 August 2012, Bratislava, Slovakia
Publisher: 
European Regional Science Association (ERSA), Louvain-la-Neuve
Abstract: 
Zipf's law is one of the best-known empirical regularities of the city-size distribution. There is extensive research on the subject, where each city is treated symmetrically in terms of the cost of transactions with other cities. Recent developments in network theory facilitate the examination of an asymmetric transport network. Under the scale-free transport network framework, the chance of observing extremes becomes higher than the Gaussian distribution predicts and therefore it explains the emergence of large clusters. City-size distributions share the same pattern. This paper proposes a way to incorporate network structure into urban economic models and explains the city-size distribution as a result of transport cost between cities.
Subjects: 
Zipf's law
city-size distribution
scale-free network
JEL: 
R12
R40
Document Type: 
Conference Paper

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