Affiliation:
1. Robert Day School of Economics and Finance Claremont McKenna College Claremont California USA
2. Department of Sociology and Criminology Villanova University Villanova Pennsylvania USA
Abstract
AbstractScholarship demonstrates that urban systems follow a power law population distribution if the population has full labor mobility. Theoretically, subpopulations should also follow a power law population distribution if that subpopulation also has full labor mobility. Examining city population distributions for White and Black Americans across US metropolitan areas from 1910 to 2020 shows that the White distribution mostly conforms to both Zipf's and Gibrat's laws throughout this period. In contrast, the Black population does not follow either law until the second half of the 20th century, a result that is consistent with theories of restricted mobility out of the South for Black Americans during the Jim Crow era.
Subject
Environmental Science (miscellaneous),Development
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