Engineering Production Functions and the Testing of Quantitative Economic Hypotheses.

This note addresses two issues concerning the empirical role of engineering production functions: (1) the possibility of deriving typical economic production function forms from underlying engineering relationships, and (2) the appropriate role of engineering production formulations for testing quantitative economic hypotheses. It is argued that much of the importance of engineering production analysis lies in its ability to serve as a basis for nonempirical tests of quantitative economic hypotheses concerning measures such as marginal products and elasticities. Copyright 1986 by The Review of Economic Studies Limited.