Some foundations for Zipf's law: Product proliferation and local spillovers

This paper embeds the canonical model of endogenous growth with product proliferation developed by Romer [Romer, P.M., 1990. Endogenous technical change. Journal of Political Economy 98, S71–S102] into a simple urban framework. This yields a reduced form isomorphic to the popular statistical device...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Human relations (New York) 2006-07, Vol.36 (4), p.542-563
Main Author: Duranton, Gilles
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Cities
City size
City size distribution
Economic impact
Endogenous growth
Growth models
Innovations
Law
Simon's model
Spillovers
Studies
Zipf's Law
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Summary:This paper embeds the canonical model of endogenous growth with product proliferation developed by Romer [Romer, P.M., 1990. Endogenous technical change. Journal of Political Economy 98, S71–S102] into a simple urban framework. This yields a reduced form isomorphic to the popular statistical device developed by Simon [Simon, H., 1955. On a class of skew distribution functions. Biometrika 42, 425–440], which in turn can yield Zipf's law for cities. The stochastic outcomes of purposeful innovation and local spillovers can thus serve as foundations for random growth models.
ISSN:0166-0462
0018-7267
1879-2308
DOI:10.1016/j.regsciurbeco.2006.03.008