Panel-data estimates of the production function and the revenue function: What differences does it make?

This is the accepted version of the following article: Mairesse, J. and Jaumandreu, J. (2005), Panel-data Estimates of the Production Function and the Revenue Function: What Difference Does It Make?. The Scandinavian Journal of Economics, 107(4), 651–672, which has been published in final form at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9442.2005.00431.xThe lack of individual firm information on output prices is a major problem in the econometrics of production. In particular, it may be expected to account for a significant share of the large discrepancies found between the cross-sectional and time-series estimates of capital and scale elasticities. However, taking advantage of two panel-data samples for which we had such information, we find that estimating the revenue function (using a nominal output measure) or the production function proper (using a real output measure) makes very little difference for our results. The biases due to other sources of specification errors are probably more important.Publicad