Aurélie Lalanne

• associate professor in urban economics
• Professor (Associate) at Université de Bordeaux

In the prevailing literature in urban economics, conducting research on urban systems at the national scale tends to provide an elegant but reductive approach to the functioning of these systems, assuming, in particular, that city size distributions are continuous. Based on an alternative framework drawing from research in ecology and complex adapt...

Modern urban growth literature frequently uses unit-root tests in order to check the empirical relevance of Gibrat’s law of random growth. The contradictory nature of the test results provided by this literature is most likely linked to the low power of unit-root tests. To address this problem, we apply unit-root testing to a large-sized sample of...

This article investigates the role of cointegration in the context of urban growth processes. It proposes the use of cointegration tests to distinguish between two versions of Gibrat’s law: a standard formalization with growth shocks that are iid across time and cities, and an alternative one with shocks that are only iid over time. It then shows t...

Cet article apporte des éclaircissements quant à l’existence d’une croissance urbaine aléatoire pour les cas Canadien et Australien. La détection de ces processus passe par un approfondissement du protocole de test en distinguant trois spécifications : marche aléatoire pure, avec dérive, et avec dérive et tendance. L’article démontre que la croissa...

This paper examines the methods to detect the nature of the urban growth processes. It seems that cointegration testing enables to disentangle two versions of Gibrat’s law: a first one with growth shocks that are iid across time and cities (implying convergence of the city-size distribution towards Zipf’s law), and an alternative one with growth sh...

The purpose of this paper is to study the hierarchical structure of the Canadian urban system and to determine the growth processes. Zipf’s law is rejected for the whole country for all periods because of a clear size-domination by a few big cities such as Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver. It appears that the dynamics of growth follow a deterministi...

Research on metropolization has been very active during the 1990s, but it seems to have relatively run out during the next decade. In this paper, we review the way metropolization was dealt with in economics these last ten years. We use bibliometric tools and network analysis so as to bring out four main fields of research. Each one is analyzed fro...

Le processus de métropolisation attire actuellement beaucoup d’attention. Une des conséquences de ce processus, observé par de nombreux chercheurs, est la croissance plus lente, voire le déclin, de villes petites et moyennes. D’un point de vue théorique, ceci est compatible avec les théories de la croissance endogène : les métropoles offrent aux ac...