A Note on Capacity Utilization and Measurement of Scale Economies
产能利用与规模经济测度札记
This article investigates the measurement of returns to scale (RTS) via a cost function in the presence of quasi-fixed inputs. Caves, Christensen, and Swanson (CCS) proposed estimation of a variable-cost function and derived a formula for computing RTS from it. This article extends the CCS results by (a) investigating the bias that would result from erroneously using a total-cost function for measuring RTS, (b) indicating that the CCS procedure for measuring scale economies…