We question the claim that the largest US cities are Pareto distributed. We show that results of multiple tests on real data are similar to those obtained when the true distribution is lognormal, and largely depend on sample sizes.

It is commonly found that distributions that seem to be lognormal over a broad range change to a power-law (Pareto) distribution for the last few percentiles. The distributions of species abundance, income and wealth as well as file, city and firm sizes are examples with this structure. We...

Considerable efforts have been made in the recent years to produce detailed topolo- gies of the Internet. While Internet topology data have brought to the attention of a wide and somehow diverse audience of scholars they have been so far over- looked by economic analyses. In this paper we...

In this paper we develop a network model of international trade which is able to replicate the concentrated and sparse nature of trade data. Our model extends the preferential attachment (PA) growth model to the case of multiple networks. Countries trade a variety of goods of different...

In this paper we develop a methodology to analyze and compare multiple global networks. We focus our analysis on the relation between human migration and trade. First, we identify the subset of products for which the presence of a community of migrants significantly increases trade intensity. To...

This paper develops a simple network model to describe the dynamic of the intensive and extensive margin of international trade flows. The result is achieved by means of the combination of two mechanisms of proportional growth: the first (discrete) determines the formation of trade links, the...

This paper studies the relationship between migration and trade, with the aim of measuring both direct and indirect network effects. We analyze trade of diferentiated and homogeneous goods using an econometric approach inspired by spatial econometrics, proposing a new way to define country...

Considerable efforts have been made in recent years to produce detailed topologies of the Internet, but so far these data have been overlooked by economists. In this paper, we suggest that such information could be used to characterize both the size of the digital economy and outsourcing at...

The paper develops a simple model to describe the dynamics of international trade flows. We show that such a setup is able to simultaneously match a large number of empirical regularities, such as the fraction of zero trade flows across pairs of countries, the positive relationship between...

The paper develops a model of proportionate growth to describe the dynamics of international trade flows. We show that a large number of the empirical regularities characterizing international trade — such as the fraction of zero trade flows across pairs of countries, the positive relationship...