Working Paper

The Pan-European Population Distribution Across Consistently Defined Functional Urban Areas

Kurt Schmidheiny, Jens Suedekum
CESifo, Munich, 2015

CESifo Working Paper No. 5335

We analyze the first data set on consistently defined functional urban areas in Europe and compare the European to the US urban system. City sizes in Europe do not follow a power law: the largest cities are “too small” to follow Zipf’s law.

CESifo Category
Empirical and Theoretical Methods
Fiscal Policy, Macroeconomics and Growth
Keywords: city size distributions, Zipf's law, functional urban areas, urban systems
JEL Classification: R110, R120