Ageing and Labour Market Development: Testing Gibrat's and Zipf's Law for Germany

摘要

Understanding the actual distribution of people in cities (including migrants) and the dynamics leading to this spatial pattern is of critical importance, both for policy-relevant issues and for developing more satisfactory theoretical models. When one analyses these topics, it is necessary to employ the two most recognised empirical regularities: Zipf s law and Gibrat's law. Roughly put, the first of these laws states that the city size in a country is proportional to its rank, while the second states that the growth rate of an entity (cities, for example, but it can also be applied to firms) is independent of its size. Scholars have dedicated many studies to the analysis of these two empirical regularities, both in supporting them and in criticizing them, but, as yet, no universal consensus has been reached. For our purposes, it is noteworthy that the existing literature provides an analysis of Gibrat's law and Zipf's law without taking demographic characteristics into account.