City Age and City Size

There has been vast interest in the distribution of city sizes in an economy, but this research has largely neglected that cities also diff er along another fundamental dimension: age. Using novel data on the foundation dates of almost 8,000 American cities, we fi nd that older cities in the US tend to be larger than younger ones. To take this nexus between city age and city size into account, we introduce endogenous city creation into a dynamic economic model of an urban system. The city size distribution that emerges in our economy delivers an excellent and robust fit to diff erent types of US city size data, in fact much better than other parameterizations derived from diff erent urban growth models. This evidence can resolve several recent debates, and build a bridge between different views in the literature on city size distributions.