Size distribution of U.S. lower tail cities

Studies that analyzed the size distribution of U.S. cities have mainly focused on the upper tail and showed that these cities adhere to Zipf’s law. However, even though a large number of cities are in the lower tail, very few studies have examined the distribution of these small cities because of data limitations. We apply reverse Pareto and reverse general Pareto distributions to analyze U.S. lower tail cities. Our results show the power law behavior of lower tail U.S. cities is accurately represented by both the reverse Pareto and general Pareto.