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Zipf's Law for Cities: An Explanation
Abstract
Zipf's law is a very tight constraint on the class of admissible models of local growth. It says that for most countries the size distribution of cities strikingly fits a power law: the number of cities with populations greater than S is proportional to 1/S. Suppose that, at least in the upper tail, all cities follow some proportional growth process (this appears to be verified emperically). This automatically leads their distribution to converge to Zipf's law.
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Cites
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Background
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Zipf Distribution of U.S. Firm Sizes
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New Trade Models, Same Old Gains?
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Self-citationThe Pareto, Zipf and other power laws
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The Life Cycle of Plants in India and Mexico *
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Scaling laws in cognitive sciences
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Religion and economic growth: was Weber right?
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There is More than a Power Law in Zipf
Cristelli, M., Batty, M., & Pietronero, L. (2012) · Scientific Reports · doi:10.1038/srep00812 · Cited by 143
Hierarchy, Complexity, Society
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Scaling and universality in the micro-structure of urban space
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A Complex Network Approach to Urban Growth
Andersson, C., Frenken, K., & Hellervik, A. (2006) · Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space · doi:10.1068/a37418 · Cited by 67
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(2003) · UCL Discovery (University College London) · Cited by 26
Axtell, R. (2018) · Handbook of Computational Economics · doi:10.1016/bs.hescom.2018.05.001 · Cited by 13
Metadata
- Authors
- Gabaix, X.
- Venue
- The Quarterly Journal of Economics
- Publisher
- Oxford University Press (OUP)
- Published
- 1999-08-01
- Volume
- 114
- Issue
- 3
- Pages
- 739-767
- ISSN
- 0033-5533 (ISSN-L)
- 1531-4650
- OpenAlex
- W2159491186
- Cited by
- 2,039
- References
- 2
- FWCI
- 57.53
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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