Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: This paper uses un-truncated city population data from three countries—the United States, Spain and Italy—to empirically test Proposition 1 put forth by Eeckhout (2004 American Economic Review, 94: 1429–1451). Eeckhout’s hypothesis was that the estimate of the Pareto exponent in a standard Zipf regression decreases with sample size, if the underlying city size distribution is lognormal. Using rolling sample regressions, we find that this proposition is only valid once we enter the lognormal body of the distribution; for the Pareto-distributed upper-tail, the estimated exponent does not vary with sample size.
Authors: Rafael González-Val, Fernando Sanz-Gracia
Institutions: Universidad de Zaragoza, Barcelona Institute of Economics
Language: English
Subfield: Economics and Econometrics
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
Awards: G1175115578, G121809054, G1622782223, G1734349695, G1855990336, G2262748287, G2309174360, G2660406951, G279363373, G300979063, G34346518, G3480869486, G3518538256, G410571670, G425668148, G430777504, G451917667, G4526231891, G4673609948, G501658238, G5080475149, G5283806177, G532591476, G5421974903, G5538414331, G5539308778, G5805502524, G5967599077, G6668011392, G7084143925, G897484643, G929308097, G99296377
OpenAlex ID: W4404242076