ON THE CHOICE OF FUNCTIONAL FORMS IN THE MEASUREMENT OF SCALE AND SCOPE ECONOMIES: GENERALIZED BOX-COX AND COMPOSITE COST FUNCTIONS

This paper estimates and compares generalized Box-Cox and composite cost functions to identify scale and scope economies. The robustness of the outcomes to different functional specifications was examined. Increasing returns to scale was common for product-specific and the overall measures. Generalized Leontief and composite forms yielded more robust elasticity, scale and scope measures. The generalized Box-Cox model was selected as the appropriate functional form as all the special cases were rejected.