This repository aims at storing the materials for a meta analysis of Zipf's law for cities in the literature, available interactively: https://clementinegeo.shinyapps.io/MetaZipf and presented in a published article: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0183919. The application itself aims at presenting a dynamic and open meta review of Zipf's law, based on a large scale interactive review of urban literature. It allows interactive queries into a pool of empirical papers formatted in a comparable way. It provides a summary of the numeric, spatial and temporal distribution of alpha found in this vast literature. It provides a static and dynamic meta analysis of Zipf's law and its evolution over time. It disentangles the statistical effects of the regression specification, of fixed study effects, of characteristics of territories and their evolution, as well as of historical events and public policies.

Description of main files:

# data/meta_zipf.csv

This table reviews and describes empirical estimations of zipf's law for cities taken from the literature, along with the specifications of the regressions and the significance of results.

# data/meta_refs.csv

This table reviews and describes the references from which empirical estimations are collected.

Literature Reviewed :

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2. Amalraj, V. C., & Subbarayan, A. (2014). Zipf?s Law and Urban Dynamics in an Indian State: Kerala (1951-2001). Journal of Applied Sciences, 14(24), 3604.
3. Anderson, G., & Ge, Y. (2005). The size distribution of Chinese cities. Regional Science and Urban Economics, 35(6), 756?776. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.regsciurbeco.2005.01.003
4. Aragón, J. A. O., & Queiroz, V. dos S. (2014). The Zipf?s law and the effects of free trade: The case of Guatemala. EconomiA, 15(1), 82?99. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.econ.2014.03.007
5. Arribas-Bel, D., Gracia, F. S., & Ximénez-de-Embún, D. (2012). Kangaroos, cities and space: a first approach to the australian urban system. Region et Developpement, 36, 165?187.
6. Batty, M. (2001). Polynucleated urban landscapes. Urban Studies, 38(4), 635?655.
7. Benguigui, L., & Blumenfeld-Lieberthal, E. (2007). Beyond the power law ? a new approach to analyze city size distributions. Computers, Environment and Urban Systems, 31(6), 648?666. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.compenvurbsys.2006.11.002
8. Berry, B. J., & Okulicz-Kozaryn, A. (2012). The city size distribution debate: Resolution for US urban regions and megalopolitan areas. Cities, 29, S17?S23.
9. Black, D., & Henderson, V. (2003). Urban evolution in the USA. Journal of Economic Geography, 3(4), 343?372.
10. Bosker, M., Brakman, S., Garretsen, H., & Schramm, M. (2008). A century of shocks: The evolution of the German city size distribution 1925?1999. Regional Science and Urban Economics, 38(4), 330?347. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.regsciurbeco.2008.04.002
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12. Bretagnolle, A., Delisle, F., Mathian, H., & Vatin, G. (2015). Urbanization of the United States over two centuries: an approach based on a long-term database (1790?2010). International Journal of Geographical Information Science, (ahead-of-print), 1?18.
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35. Holmes, T. J., & Lee, S. (2010). Cities as Six-by-Six-Mile Squares: Zipf?s Law? NBER, 105?131.
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Missing references from Nitsch2005:

Allen1954 : no access to the journal volume,

Lasuen1967 : no access to the journal volume,

Lagopoulos : no access to the journal volume,

deVries1984 : no access to the book,

Eaton/Eckstein1997 : the regressions of the paper are multi criteria and not comparable to the ones reported here,

davis/Weinstein2002: the regression is performed on population density and not comparable to the ones reported here.