Search results for "jel:C46"

Pareto or log-normal? A recursive-truncation approach to the distribution of (all) cities

2012

Traditionally, it is assumed that the population size of cities in a country follows a Pareto distribution. This assumption is typically supported by finding evidence of Zipf's Law. Recent studies question this finding, highlighting that, while the Pareto distribution may fit reasonably well when the data is truncated at the upper tail, i.e. for the largest cities of a country, the log-normal distribution may apply when all cities are considered. Moreover, conclusions may be sensitive to the choice of a particular truncation threshold, a yet overlooked issue in the literature. In this paper, then, we reassess the city size distribution in relation to its sensitivity to the choice of truncat…