IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/eim/papers/n200503.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Zipf's Law in Economics

Author

Listed:
  • Gerrit de Wit

Abstract

Many empirical size distributions in economics and elsewhere follow Zipf?s law. Starting from the Gibrat assumption, it is essential to add a second as-sumption to explain this phenomenon.

Suggested Citation

  • Gerrit de Wit, 2005. "Zipf's Law in Economics," Scales Research Reports N200503, EIM Business and Policy Research.
    • Handle: RePEc:eim:papers:n200503
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.entrepreneurship-sme.eu/pdf-ez/N200503.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. de Wit, Gerrit, 2005. "Firm size distributions: An overview of steady-state distributions resulting from firm dynamics models," International Journal of Industrial Organization, Elsevier, vol. 23(5-6), pages 423-450, June.
    2. Reed, William J., 2001. "The Pareto, Zipf and other power laws," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 74(1), pages 15-19, December.
    3. Fujiwara, Yoshi & Di Guilmi, Corrado & Aoyama, Hideaki & Gallegati, Mauro & Souma, Wataru, 2004. "Do Pareto–Zipf and Gibrat laws hold true? An analysis with European firms," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 335(1), pages 197-216.
    4. Xavier Gabaix, 1999. "Zipf's Law for Cities: An Explanation," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 114(3), pages 739-767.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Xavier Gabaix, 2009. "Power Laws in Economics and Finance," Annual Review of Economics, Annual Reviews, vol. 1(1), pages 255-294, May.
    2. ARATA Yoshiyuki, 2014. "Firm Growth and Laplace Distribution: The importance of large jumps," Discussion papers 14033, Research Institute of Economy, Trade and Industry (RIETI).
    3. Malevergne, Y. & Saichev, A. & Sornette, D., 2013. "Zipf's law and maximum sustainable growth," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 37(6), pages 1195-1212.
    4. Gatti, Domenico Delli & Guilmi, Corrado Di & Gaffeo, Edoardo & Giulioni, Gianfranco & Gallegati, Mauro & Palestrini, Antonio, 2005. "A new approach to business fluctuations: heterogeneous interacting agents, scaling laws and financial fragility," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 56(4), pages 489-512, April.
    5. Segarra, Agustí & Teruel, Mercedes, 2012. "An appraisal of firm size distribution: Does sample size matter?," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 82(1), pages 314-328.
    6. Massing, Till & Puente-Ajovín, Miguel & Ramos, Arturo, 2020. "On the parametric description of log-growth rates of cities’ sizes of four European countries and the USA," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 551(C).
    7. Keiichi Kishi, 2016. "Technology Diffusion, Pareto Distribution, and Patent Policy," Discussion Papers in Economics and Business 16-31, Osaka University, Graduate School of Economics.
    8. de Wit, Gerrit, 2005. "Firm size distributions: An overview of steady-state distributions resulting from firm dynamics models," International Journal of Industrial Organization, Elsevier, vol. 23(5-6), pages 423-450, June.
    9. Xavier Gabaix & Augustin Landier, 2008. "Why has CEO Pay Increased So Much?," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 123(1), pages 49-100.
    10. Keith Head & Thierry Mayer & Mathias Thoenig, 2014. "Welfare and Trade without Pareto," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 104(5), pages 310-316, May.
    11. Wright, Ian, 2009. "Implicit Microfoundations for Macroeconomics," Economics - The Open-Access, Open-Assessment E-Journal (2007-2020), Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW Kiel), vol. 3, pages 1-27.
    12. Soo, Kwok Tong, 2005. "Zipf's Law for cities: a cross-country investigation," Regional Science and Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 35(3), pages 239-263, May.
    13. Aïd, René & Basei, Matteo & Ferrari, Giorgio, 2023. "A Stationary Mean-Field Equilibrium Model of Irreversible Investment in a Two-Regime Economy," Center for Mathematical Economics Working Papers 679, Center for Mathematical Economics, Bielefeld University.
    14. Ramón Rufín & Cayetano Medina, 2008. "Market delimitation, firm survival and growth in service industries," The Service Industries Journal, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 30(9), pages 1401-1417, September.
    15. Growiec, Jakub & Pammolli, Fabio & Riccaboni, Massimo & Stanley, H. Eugene, 2008. "On the size distribution of business firms," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 98(2), pages 207-212, February.
    16. Anderson, Gordon & Ge, Ying, 2005. "The size distribution of Chinese cities," Regional Science and Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 35(6), pages 756-776, November.
    17. , & Lorenz, Jan & ,, 2016. "Innovation vs. imitation and the evolution of productivity distributions," Theoretical Economics, Econometric Society, vol. 11(3), September.
    18. Beare, Brendan K & Toda, Alexis Akira, 2020. "On the emergence of a power law in the distribution of COVID-19 cases," University of California at San Diego, Economics Working Paper Series qt9k5027d0, Department of Economics, UC San Diego.
    19. Giulio Bottazzi & Davide Pirino & Federico Tamagni, 2015. "Zipf law and the firm size distribution: a critical discussion of popular estimators," Journal of Evolutionary Economics, Springer, vol. 25(3), pages 585-610, July.
    20. Toda, Alexis Akira, 2017. "A Note On The Size Distribution Of Consumption: More Double Pareto Than Lognormal," Macroeconomic Dynamics, Cambridge University Press, vol. 21(6), pages 1508-1518, September.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eim:papers:n200503. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Webmaster EIM (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/eimbpnl.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.