TY  - JOUR
AU  - Rose,Andrew K.
TI  - Cities and Countries
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 11762
PY  - 2005
Y2  - November 2005
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w11762
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w11762.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Andrew K. Rose
Haas School of Business Administration
University of California, Berkeley
Berkeley, CA 94720-1900
Tel: 510/642-6609
Fax: 510/642-4700
E-Mail: arose@haas.berkeley.edu
AB  - If one ranks cities by population, the rank of a city is inversely related to its size, a well-documented phenomenon known as Zipf's Law. Further, the growth rate of a city's population is uncorrelated with its size, another well-known characteristic known as Gibrat's Law. In this paper, I show that both characteristics are true of countries as well as cities; the size distributions of cities and countries are similar. But theories that explain the size-distribution of cities do not obviously apply in explaining the size-distribution of countries. The similarity of city- and country-size distributions is an interesting riddle.
ER  -