Is there a universal parametric city size distribution? Empirical evidence for 70 countries

Author:

Miguel Puente-Ajovín, Arturo Ramos, Fernando Sanz-Gracia

Keyword:

Economics, General Economics, General Economics (econ.GN)

journal:

The Annals of Regional Science 65, 727-741 (2020)

date:

2023-08-18 16:00:00

Abstract

We study the parametric description of the city size distribution (CSD) of 70 different countries (developed and developing) using seven models, as follows: the lognormal (LN), the loglogistic (LL), the double Pareto lognormal (dPLN), the two-lognormal (2LN), the two-loglogistic (2LL), the three-lognormal (3LN) and the three-loglogistic (3LL). Our results show that 3LN and 3LL are the best densities in terms of non-rejections out of standard statistical tests. Meanwhile, according to the information criteria AIC and BIC, there is no systematically dominant distribution.

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