Abstract
Power law distributions characterise several natural and social phenomena. Zipf's law for cities is one of those. The study views the question of whether that global regularity is independent of different spatial distributions of cities. For that purpose, a typical Zipfian rank-size distribution of cities is generated with random numbers. This distribution is then cast into two different settings of spatial coordinates. For the estimation, the variables rank and size are supplemented by considerations of spatial dependence within a spatial econometric approach. Results suggest that distance potentially matters. This finding is further corroborated by four country analyses even though estimates reveal only modest effects.
Publication types
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Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't
MeSH terms
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Cities
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Humans
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Models, Econometric*
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Spatial Analysis
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Urbanization*
Grants and funding
The author is affiliated as partner with PRAC. PRAC is a private institute organised as a partnership company. The research represented by the paper at hand is a secondary outcome of a current research project, being funded by the European Commission „Horizon2020“ programme (grant No. 727988). The funder has not been involved in the study design, data collection, decision to publish and preparation of the manuscript. The only criterion to be fulfilled by the author is the thematical relevance of this manuscript for the purpose of the a.m. research project. The funder provided support in the form of salaries for authors [RB], but did not have any additional role in the study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. The specific roles of these authors are articulated in the ‘author contributions’ section. My commercial affiliation (PRAC) did not play any role in this context. The paper was exclusively prepared and written by myself.