TY  - JOUR
AU  - Rozenfeld,Hernán D.
AU  - Rybski,Diego
AU  - Gabaix,Xavier
AU  - Makse,Hernán A.
TI  - The Area and Population of Cities: New Insights from a Different Perspective on Cities
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 15409
PY  - 2009
Y2  - October 2009
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w15409
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w15409.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Hernán D. Rozenfeld
Levich Institute
City College of New York
140th Street & Convent Avenue
New York, NY 10031
E-Mail: hernanrozenfeld@gmail.com

Diego Rybski
City College of New York
140th Street & Convent Avenue
New York, NY 10031
E-Mail: diego.rybski@pik-potsdam.de

Xavier Gabaix
New York University
Finance Department
Stern School of Business
44 West 4th Street, 9th floor
New York, NY 10012
Tel: 212-998-0257
Fax: 212-995-4233
E-Mail: xgabaix@stern.nyu.edu

Hernan Makse
140th Street & Convent Avenue
New York, NY 10031
E-Mail: hmakse@lev.ccny.cuny.edu
AB  - The distribution of the population of cities has attracted a great deal of attention, in part because it sharply constrains models of local growth. However, to this day, there is no consensus on the distribution below the very upper tail, because available data need to rely on the “legal” rather than “economic” definition of cities for medium and small cities. To remedy this difficulty, in this work we construct cities “from the bottom up” by clustering populated areas obtained from high-resolution data. This method allows us to investigate the population and area of cities for urban agglomerations of all sizes. We find that Zipf’s law (a power law with exponent close to 1) for population holds for cities as small as 12,000 inhabitants in the USA and 5,000 inhabitants in Great Britain. In addition the distribution of city areas is also close to a Zipf’s law. We provide a parsimonious model with endogenous city area that is consistent with those findings.
ER  -