Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/89536 
Year of Publication: 
2013
Series/Report no.: 
LEM Working Paper Series No. 2013/22
Publisher: 
Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna, Laboratory of Economics and Management (LEM), Pisa
Abstract: 
The paper presents a new framework to assess firm level heterogeneity and to study the rate and direction of technical change. Building on the analysis of revealed short-run production functions by Hildenbrand (1981), we propose the (normalized) volume of the zonotope composed by vectors-firms in a narrowly defined industry as an indicator of inter-firm heterogeneity. Moreover, the angles that the main diagonal of the zonotope form with the axes provides a measure of the rates and directions of technical change over time. The proposed framework can easily account for n-inputs and m-outputs and, crucially, the measures of heterogeneity and technical change do not require many of the standard assumptions from production theory.
Subjects: 
Production theory
Heterogeneous firms
Activity Analysis
Technical change
Zonotopes
Production functions
JEL: 
D24
D61
C67
C81
O30
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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