Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/230101 
Year of Publication: 
2020
Citation: 
[Journal:] Papers in Regional Science [ISSN:] 1435-5957 [Volume:] 99 [Issue:] 3 [Publisher:] Wiley [Place:] Hoboken, NJ [Year:] 2020 [Pages:] 841-852
Publisher: 
Wiley, Hoboken, NJ
Abstract: 
Exploiting the hierarchical structure of cities and based on a dataset for U.S. cities between 1840 and 2016, the aim of this paper is to analyze the evolution of the U.S. city size distribution. For that purpose we estimate a general three-parameter Zipf model, which can be traced back to Mandelbrot (1982), and validate our results by means of the hierarchical scaling law. Especially in the second half of the twentieth century, we find a pronounced departure from the exact Zipf's law. The city size distribution has become more equally distributed over time. Besides, the applied estimation method reveals evidence for leading cities dominating the remaining largest cities. Thus, the growing equality of the city sizes can be explained rather by growing smaller cities than by a loss of importance of the largest ones.
Subjects: 
city size distributions
Zipf's law
hierachical scaling law
urban systems
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Creative Commons License: 
cc-by-nc-nd Logo
Document Type: 
Article
Document Version: 
Published Version

Files in This Item:
File
Size





Items in EconStor are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.