Gibrat’s law for cities, growth regressions and sample size

González-Val, Rafael and Lanaspa, Luis and Sanz, Fernando (2012): Gibrat’s law for cities, growth regressions and sample size.

Abstract

This paper uses un-truncated city population data from six countries (the United States, Spain, Italy, France, England and Japan) to illustrate how parametric growth regressions can lead to biased results when testing for Gibrat’s law in city size distributions. The OLS results show non-monotonic behaviours depending on the sample size. Moreover, it is possible to find a critical sample size from which we reject Gibrat’s law.

• Item Type: MPRA Paper
• Language: English
• Keywords: Gibrat’s law; city size distribution; urban growth
• Subjects: R - Urban, Rural, Regional, Real Estate, and Transportation Economics > R0 - General > R00 - General; R - Urban, Rural, Regional, Real Estate, and Transportation Economics > R1 - General Regional Economics > R12 - Size and Spatial Distributions of Regional Economic Activity; R - Urban, Rural, Regional, Real Estate, and Transportation Economics > R1 - General Regional Economics > R11 - Regional Economic Activity: Growth, Development, Environmental Issues, and Changes

References

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González-Val, R., L. Lanaspa, and F. Sanz (2012). New Evidence on Gibrat’s Law for Cities. IEB Working paper No. 2012/18.