American Economic Review Vol. 99 No. 4 2009
Gibrat's Law for (All) Cities: Reply
Abstract
This reply refutes the objection raised by Levy (2009) about the fit of the upper tail of the city size distribution in Eeckhout (2004). I show that the method on which his conclusion is based is unsubstantiated. The visual interpretation of the fit on log-log plots is misleading. In addition, the methodology used to estimate a truncated subsample of the distribution while testing its significance against a distribution with prespecified parameters is ill-founded. The main conclusion is that Gibrat's law holds: city sizes follow proportionate growth, thus giving rise to a lognormal size distribution, tail included.
- DOI
- 10.1257/aer.99.4.1676
- Volume
- 99
- Issue
- 4
- Pages
- 1676-1683
- Language
- en
- Sources
- bibtex:phds-export.bib openalex crossref