On the parametric description of log-growth rates of cities’ sizes of four European countries and the USA

We have studied the parametric description of the distribution of the log-growth rates of the sizes of cities of France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the USA. We have considered several parametric distributions well known in the literature as well as some others recently introduced. There are some models that provide similar excellent performance, for all studied samples. The normal distribution is not the one observed empirically. •We introduce new models based on mixtures of Student’s t distributions.•The new models are very competitive with respect to the previous dmeGB2.•We observe that the tails of log-growth rates of city sizes are mainly non-exponential.•We observe that the results do not depend on the type of urbanization or the age of cities.