We examine, with the tools of economics, a fundamental tenet of some of the most recent theoretical work in sociology, which we refer to as the Postmodernist Critique : preferences are socially constructed, firms exploit their monopoly power through advertising in order to create new (false)...

Production functions provide a mapping from the firms' input quantity and productivity to output quantity. This mapping only generates unbiased estimates if input and output quality variation within and between observation units is accounted for. I review and classify state-of-the-art methods to...