Why Is the Cobb-Douglas Production Function so Popular?

It is well known that, in continuous time, the Cobb-Douglas function can be derived from the underlying, data governing, accounting identity under some reasonable assumptions (factor shares are constant, and the weighted growth of the labour input price and the capital input price is constant). In this paper these results are generalized in three ways: 1) the accounting identity contains a (pure) profit term; 2) continuous time is replaced by discrete time periods; 3) additional assumptions appear to be superfluous