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New Evidence on Gibrat’s Law for Cities

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  • González-Val, Rafael
  • Lanaspa, Luis
  • Sanz, Fernando

Abstract

The aim of this work is to test empirically the validity of Gibrat’s Law in the growth of cities, using data for all the twentieth century of the complete distribution of cities (without any size restrictions) in three countries: the US, Spain and Italy. On considering the distribution of cities, we find a tendency to divergence. However, this fact does not impede, whether from an empirical or a theoretical point of view, that city size distribution can be adequately approximated with a lognormal distribution. Also, the conclusions which can be obtained as to fulfilment or not of Gibrat’s Law depend, first, on the sample size and, second, on the size of the cities being considered (large or small), which means that the results of any study which does not use all the distribution will be relative.

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Bibliographic Info

Paper provided by University Library of Munich, Germany in its series MPRA Paper with number 10411.

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Date of creation: 05 Sep 2008
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Handle: RePEc:pra:mprapa:10411

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Keywords: Gibrat’s Law; city size distribution; urban growth;

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References

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Cited by:
  1. Michaels, Guy & Rauch, Ferdinand & Redding, Stephen J, 2008. "Urbanization and Structural Transformation," CEPR Discussion Papers 7016, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
  2. González-Val, Rafael & Lanaspa, Luis & Sanz, Fernando, 2012. "Gibrat’s law for cities, growth regressions and sample size," MPRA Paper 42615, University Library of Munich, Germany.

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