Original title: Essays on Zipf´s Law for Cities
Translated title: Zipf's law for cities: Is Zipf exponent correlated with level of freedom?
Authors: Šindelář, Jakub ; Šťastný, Daniel (advisor) ; Potužák, Pavel (referee)
Document type: Master’s theses
Year: 2012
Language: eng
Publisher: Vysoká škola ekonomická v Praze
Abstract: This master thesis contains three independent papers on the Zip's law for cities. In the first essay I summarize accumulated knowledge and use examples from the Czech Republic to show problems of the empirical research. The main findings of this essay are: City size distribution in the Czech Republic can be better described by a log-normal distribution than by a Pareto distribution; Pareto exponents are sensitive to sample selection. The second essay is the largest empirical cross-country study on Zipf's law for cites. The mean value for 157 countries is 0.919. The comparison with the study by Soo (2005) showed a decreasing tendency of the Pareto exponent, since for the same countries, the average exponent decreased from 1.11 to 1.02. One possible explanation of this trend is the process of urbanization. The last essay looks at the topic from a different angle. I have developed an agent based model to describe the process of suburbanization and cities merging and its impact on the size of the Pareto exponent. I have shown that when cities merge, the exponent starts to fall down from a steady state.
Keywords: multiagent model; Pareto exponent; Zipf law; Paretův exponent; urbanizace; Zipfův zákon

Institution: University of Economics, Prague (web)
Document availability information: Available in the digital repository of the University of Economics, Prague.
Original record: http://www.vse.cz/vskp/eid/38885

Permalink: http://www.nusl.cz/ntk/nusl-165618


The record appears in these collections:
Universities and colleges > Public universities > University of Economics, Prague
Academic theses (ETDs) > Master’s theses