Modern textbook presentations of production economics typically treat producers as successful optimizers. Conventional econometric practice has generally followed this paradigm, and least squares based regression techniques have been used to estimate production, cost, profit and other functions. In [...]

The productivity of a business exerts an important influence on its financial performance. A similar influence exists for industries and economies: those with superior productivity performance thrive at the expense of others. Productivity performance helps explain the growth and demise of businesses[...]