This paper examines empirically some of the reasons why Japanese manufacturing firms frequently fail to satisfy concavity conditions of the cost function. We focus on the “bubble period” in the 1980s when land was in great demand for reasons related to both production and speculation, and...

This paper examines empirically some of the reasons why Japanese manufacturing firms frequently fail to satisfy concavity conditions of the cost function. We focus on the "bubble period" in the 1980s when land was in great demand for reasons related to both production and speculation, and land...

This is a study of the effects of R&D spillovers on the cost and production structures of Finnish manufacturing firms. Confidential data on firms is used to estimate a translog cost function system with random coefficients. Although the results suggest that intra-industry spillovers are present...

We investigate the behavior of three versions of the translog cost function: the standard Log-quadratic version and two nonlinear versions with exponential and linear technical progress biases, respectively. Their performances are assessed according to three criteria: (i) on theoretical ground,...

This paper argues that the conventional definition of the elasticity of complementarity is not well suited to deal with the case of increasing returns. It proposes a slightly different formula, that uses a distance function formulation instead of a production function. The proposed definition...