Does Zipf's law hold for Polish cities?

• Authors: Andrzej Cieślik , Jan Teresiński

Abstracts

EN

In this paper we study Zipf's law, which postulates that the product of a city's population and its rank (the number of cities with a larger or equal population) is constant for every city in a given region. We show that the empirical literature indicates that the law may not always hold, although its general form, the rank-size rule, could be a good first approximation of city size distribution. We perform our own empirical analysis of the distribution of the population of polish cities on the largest possible sample to find that Zipf's law is rejected for poland as the city sizes are less evenly distributed than it predicts.

Keywords

EN

Zipf's law; rank-size rule; city size distribution; Poland

• Publisher: Wydział Geografii i Studiów Regionalnych Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego
• Journal: Miscellanea Geographica. Regional Studies on Development
• Year: 2016
• Volume: 20
• Issue: 4
• Pages: 5-10

Dates

published

2016

Contributors

author

Andrzej Cieślik

• Department of Macroeconomics and International Trade Theory, Faculty of Economic Sciences, University of Warsaw

author

Jan Teresiński

• European University Institute of Florence

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Identifiers

DOI

10.1515/mgrsd-2016-0020

Biblioteka Nauki

2040370