The nonlinear distribution of employment across municipalities

Abstract

In this paper, the nonlinear distribution of employment across Spanish municipalitiesis analyzed. Also, we explore new properties of the family of generalized power law(GPL) distributions and explore its hierarchical structure, then we test its adequacy formodeling employment data. A new subfamily of heavy-tailed GPL distributions thatis right tail equivalent to a Pareto (power-law) model is derived. Our findings showon the one hand that the distribution of employment across Spanish municipalitiesfollows a power-law behavior in the upper tail and, on the other hand, the adequacyof GPL models for modeling employment data in the whole range of the distribution