For thousands of years, the Chinese and many other nations around the world built defensive walls around their cities. This phenomenon is not well understood from an economic perspective. To rationalize the existence of city walls, we propose a simple model that relates the dimensions of city walls to a set of economic variables. Guided by this model, we conduct an empirical analysis using hand...

In his pioneering research, G. K. Zipf observed that more frequent words tend to have more meanings, and showed that the number of meanings of a word grows as the square root of its frequency. He derived this relationship from two assumptions: that words follow Zipf’s law for word frequencies (a power law dependency between frequency and rank) and Zipf’s law of meaning distribution (a power law...

We have translated fractional Brownian motion (FBM) signals into a text based on two ”letters”, as if the signal fluctuations correspond to a constant stepsize random walk. We have applied the Zipf method to extract the ζ′ exponent relating the word frequency and its rank on a loglog plot. We have studied the variation of the Zipf exponent(s) giving the relationship between the frequency of occ...

Recently I have been intrigued by the reappearance of an old friend, George Kingsley Zipf, in a number of not entirely expected places. The law named for him is ubiquitous, but Zipf did not actually discover the law so much as provide a plausible explanation. Others have proposed modifications to Zipf's Law, and closer examination uncovers systematic deviations from its normative form. We demon...

This dissertation studies three topics in modern Chinese economic development. The problems tackled include the determinants of city size distribution and economy growth, the impact of privatization of the state-owned enterprises (SOEs), and the relationship between executive compensation and …rm-level risk. Chapter 1 documents the emergence of Zipf’s law in China, using a new database containi...

The moment analysis method and nuclear Zipf’s law of fragment size distributions are reviewed to study nuclear disassembly. In this report, we present a compilation of both theoretical and experimental studies on moment analysis and Zipf law performed so far. The relationship of both methods to a possible critical behavior or phase transition of nuclear disassembly is discussed. In addition, sc...

The paper studies the probabilities of the occurrence of m word phrases (m=2,3, ...) in relation with the probabilities of occurrence of the single words. It is well-known that, in the latter case, the law of Zipf is valid (i.e. a power law). We prove that in the case of m word phrases (m22) this is not the case. We present two independent proofs of this. We furthermore show that in case we wan...