The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable · chapter 2 · id the-black-swan-c2-03-city-sizes-follow-a-power-law-

“City sizes follow a power law distribution (Zipf's law), where the largest city is roughly twice the size of the second largest, three times the third, and so on -- an example of Extremistan dynamics.”

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Receipts

Nitsch (2005), 'Zipf's law and city size distribution: A survey', Physica A (2017 survey update)paywalled — manual check queued

A meta-analysis of 29 published studies found that the combined estimate of Pareto exponent is significantly greater than one, suggesting a more even city size distribution than pure Zipf's law predicts.

Gabaix (2009), 'Power Laws in Economics and Finance', Annual Review of Economicssource alive

Power laws appear to describe the distributions of city sizes, firm sizes, income, and wealth reasonably well, at least in the upper tail.

Cristelli et al. (2012), 'There is More than a Power Law in Zipf', Scientific Reportssource alive

The standard Zipf analysis misses substructure in city size distributions. Pure power law fits are rejected for many countries when proper statistical tests are applied.

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