The pan-European population distribution across consistently defined functional urban areas
K Schmidheiny, J Suedekum - Economics Letters, 2015 - Elsevier
… We analyze the first data set on consistently defined functional urban areas in Europe
and compare the European to the US urban system. City sizes in Europe do not follow a
power law: the largest cities are “too small” to follow Zipf’s law. … To be consistent with
previous studies, we also consider only the largest 135 urban areas, which lead to a
minimum population size of 261,952 (Atlantic City, NJ) in our case. Repeating regression (1)
with this US data, we obtain ζ ˆ = 0.960 (robust standard error …
and compare the European to the US urban system. City sizes in Europe do not follow a
power law: the largest cities are “too small” to follow Zipf’s law. … To be consistent with
previous studies, we also consider only the largest 135 urban areas, which lead to a
minimum population size of 261,952 (Atlantic City, NJ) in our case. Repeating regression (1)
with this US data, we obtain ζ ˆ = 0.960 (robust standard error …