Some Foundations for Zipf's Law: Product Proliferation and Local Spillovers
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Zipf's law
endogenous growth
Simon's model
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This paper embeds the canonical model of endogenous growth with product proliferation developed by Romer [Romer, P.M., 1990. Endogenous technical change. Journal of Political Economy 98, S71–S102] into a simple urban framework. This yields a reduced form isomorphic to the popular statistical device developed by Simon [Simon, H., 1955. On a class of skew distribution functions. Biometrika 42, 425–440], which in turn can yield Zipf's law for cities. The stochastic outcomes of purposeful innovation and local spillovers can thus serve as foundations for random growth models.
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The postprint version of this article, Some economics for Zipf’s law: Romer and Simon unified, was published in its final version as Some foundations for Zipf's law: Product proliferation and local spillovers.