On the parametric description of log-growth rates of cities' sizes of four European countries and the USA

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the distribution of city size growth rates across five countries, comparing various parametric models and finding that the normal distribution does not fit the empirical data well.

Contribution

It introduces a comparative analysis of multiple parametric distributions for city growth rates across several countries, highlighting models that perform well.

Findings

Several models fit the data well across countries

The normal distribution does not match empirical city growth rates

Some recently introduced distributions outperform traditional ones

Abstract

We have studied the parametric description of the distribution of the log-growth rates of the sizes of cities of France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the USA. We have considered several parametric distributions well known in the literature as well as some others recently introduced. There are some models that provide similar excellent performance, for all studied samples. The normal distribution is not the one observed empirically.