This paper analyses the evolution of city size distribution in the United States throughout the twentieth century. In particular, it tests the validity of two empirical regularities studied in urban economics: Zipf's law, which postulates that the product between rank and size of a population is constant, and Gibrat's law or the law of proportionate growth, according to which the growth rate of a variable is independent of its initial size. To achieve this, we use parametric and nonparametric methods. The main contribution of this work is the use of a new database with information on all the cities (understood as incorporated places), thus covering the entire distribution (without size restrictions). Our results enable us to con…rm, from a long term perspective, that Gibrat's law holds (weakly) and that Zipf's law holds only if the sample is su¢ ciently restricted at the top, not for a larger sample, because city size distribution follows a lognormal when we consider all cities.

The aim of this work is to test empirically the validity of Gibrat’s law on the growth of cities, using data on the complete distribution of cities (without size restrictions) from three countries (the US, Spain and Italy) for the entire 20th century. In order to achieve this, different techniques are used. First, panel data unit root tests tend to confirm the validity of Gibrat’s law in the upper-tail distribution. Secondly, when the entire distribution is considered using non-parametric methods, it is found that Gibrat’s law does not hold exactly in the long term (in general, size affects the variance of the growth process but not its mean). Moreover, the log-normal distribution works well as a description of city size distributions across the whole century when no truncation point is considered.

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In this paper, we examine the role of the business cycle in divorce. To do so, we use a panel of 29 European countries covering the period from 1991 to 2012. We find the unemployment rate negatively affects the divorce rate, pointing to a pro-cyclical evolution of the divorce rate, even after controlling for socio-economic variables and unobservable characteristics that can vary by country, and/or over time. Results indicate that a onepercentage-point increase in the unemployment rate involves almost 0.025 fewer divorces per thousand inhabitants. The impact is small, representing around 1.2% of the average divorce rate in Europe during the period considered. Supplementary analysis, developed to explore a possible non-linear pattern, confirms a negative relationship between unemployment and divorce in European countries, with the inverse relationship being more pronounced in those countries with higher divorce rates.JEL Codes: C14, C23, J12

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ABSTRACT:In this paper, we examine whether the business cycle plays a role in marriage and divorce. We use data on Spain, since the differences between recession and expansion periods across regions are quite pronounced in that country. We find that the unemployment rate is negatively associated with the marriage rate, pointing to a procyclical evolution of marriage; however the response of the divorce rate to the business cycle is mixed. Results show the existence of different patterns, depending on geography: divorce rates in coastal regions are pro-cyclical, while in inland regions divorces react to unemployment in a counter-cyclical way.

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This paper investigates the determinants of the diffusion and intensity of the COVID‐19 at the country level, focusing on the role played by urban agglomeration, measured using three urban variables: percentage of the urban population, population density, and primacy. We estimate the influence of urban agglomeration on two outcome variables: cumulative number of cases and deaths per 100,000 inhabitants up to 31 December 2020, using both parametric and semiparametric models. We also explore possible spatial effects. The non‐linear effects of the urban variables on the intensity of the disease reveal non‐monotonous relationships, suggesting that it is the size of the urban system that is linked to a stronger incidence.