American Economic Review
ISSN 0002-8282 (Print) | ISSN 1944-7981 (Online)
The Area and Population of Cities: New Insights from a Different Perspective on Cities
American Economic Review
vol. 101,
no. 5, August 2011
(pp. 2205–25)
Abstract
The distribution of city populations has attracted much attention, in part because it constrains models of local growth. However, there is no consensus on the distribution below the very upper tail, because available data need to rely on "legal" rather than "economic" definitions for medium and small cities. To remedy this difficulty, we construct cities "from the bottom up" by clustering populated areas obtained from high-resolution data. We find that Zipf's law for population holds for cities as small as 5,000 inhabitants in Great Britain and 12,000 inhabitants in the US. We also find a Zipf's law for areas. JEL: R11, R12, R23Citation
Rozenfeld, Hernán D., Diego Rybski, Xavier Gabaix, and Hernán A. Makse. 2011. "The Area and Population of Cities: New Insights from a Different Perspective on Cities." American Economic Review, 101 (5): 2205–25. DOI: 10.1257/aer.101.5.2205Additional Materials
JEL Classification
- R11 Regional Economic Activity: Growth, Development, and Changes
- R12 Size and Spatial Distributions of Regional Economic Activity
- R23 Urban, Rural, and Regional Economics: Regional Migration; Regional Labor Markets; Population; Neighborhood Characteristics