"At the 1927 meetings of the American Economic Association, Paul Douglas presented a paper entitled "A Theory of Production", which he had coauthored with Charles Cobb. The paper proposed the now familiar Cobb-Douglas function as a general mathematical representation of the relationship between the amounts of capital and labor employed in the US manufacturing sector and the quantity of output produced by that sector. The paper's innovation, however, was not the function itself, as this functional form had been previously proposed by Knut Wicksell and others; but the use of the function as the basis of a statistical procedure for estimating the parameters of this relationship. It is this procedure, a linear regression of the log of a measure of the output of some production activity on the logs of measures of inputs used in the activity, that I call in this book "the Cobb-Douglas regression". In a broader sense, the paper's innovation was the idea motivating and underlying the particular linear regression used by Cobb and Douglas: that a stable, quantifiable relationship between the inputs to and outputs of production processes existed and could be discovered through regression analysis, and that knowledge of this relationship would help to answer important questions of economic theory and policy"-- Provided by publisher.
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