Fig. 7: International inflow scales superlinearly with city size.
Panel (A) shows the number of international immigrants as a function of the city size S for the 384 U.S. metro areas. The performance of the model Y = Y0Sθ, in which θ = 1.19 (95% CI [1.13, 1.24]) and Y0 = 4.10−4 is a normalization constant, is assessed by the coefficient of determination R2. Note that the spread of empirical data around the model narrows as the size of the city increases. Panel (B) shows the rank of the metro areas and the residues, which captures the deviation from the null model thus highligthing cities receiving more/less than expected international inflows. Names of the cities are followed by two-letter state abbreviations.
