The nonlinear distribution of employment across municipalities

In this paper, the nonlinear distribution of employment across Spanish municipalities is 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 for modeling employment data. A new subfamily of heavy-tailed GPL distributions that is right tail equivalent to a Pareto (power-law) model is derived. Our findings show on the one hand that the distribution of employment across Spanish municipalities follows a power-law behavior in the upper tail and, on the other hand, the adequacy of GPL models for modeling employment data in the whole range of the distribution.