Searching for functional structure in multi-output multi-skill technologies

Abstract

In order to represent a bunch of inputs and outputs by some aggregate measure, a production's unit technology must typically satisfy some restrictive conditions, some of them being well known in the literature. This papers presents some new results for aggregating labour inputs and outputs, in terms of restriction on clasticities of scale and substitution. These conditions are then empirically investigated, in a framework that is flexible and does not loose its flexibility after separability being imposed. The empirical findings of the exact approach to aggregation are fond to be rather pessimistic on the possibility to provide a simplified representation.