April 2015

IZA DP No. 9020: The Pan-European Population Distribution Across Consistently Defined Functional Urban Areas

published in: Economics Letters, 2015, 133, 10-13

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.