Small and Big Business

Steindl, Josef

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Document type:: Works

Collection:: Josef Steindl Collection

Title:: Small and Big Business: Introduction [carbon copy of the 2nd revision]

Author:: Steindl, Josef

Scope:: Typoskript, Durchschlag, 21 Blätter, mit handschriftlichen Korrekturen

Year of publication:: 1978

Source material date:: [04.1978]

Note:: Das Typoskript stellt die zweite Überarbeitung der 1972 neu verfassten Einleitung zu "Small and Big Business" (1945) vermutlich zwecks der spanischen Ausgabe des Buches dar. Die erste Seite enthält mit Bleistift festgehaltenen Seitenangaben, wo Korrekturen vorgenommen wurden.

Topic:: Firm and market structure

JEL Classification:: D24 [Production, Cost, Capital, Capital, Total Factor, and Multifactor Productivity, Capacity] D43 [Market Structure, Pricing, and Design: Oligopoly and Other Forms of Market Imperfection] L11 [Production, Pricing, and Market Structure, Size Distribution of Firms]

Shelfmark:: S/M.3.10

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.48671/nls.js.AC14446393

13 Moreover, these series of historically successive techniques are also the ones which can be regarded as being simultaneously available to a prospective investor in the field. Whether we find in the range of these available methods all three stages (increasing, constant and diminishing returns) represented cannot be ascertained with confidence. It appears likely, however, that the economist's conviction about the importance of diminishing returns rests on prejudice, and that we hardly ever enter the range of diminishing returns, or of increasing capital-output ratios. It is conceivable that the relation of profit margin and profit rate expounded in Chapter III at least partly explains why this should be so: If the capital-output ratio is in creased, the profit margin must increase, else the method would be rejected because of the implied decline in profit rate. As the profit margin increases, a further increase in capital-output ratio is less likely to yield a constant profit rate. Thus the increase in capital coefficient would tend to set limits for itself sooner of 3»ater. Whether this is in fact the explanation of the apparent constancy of capital- output ratios in history, or their decline with size anc advancedness of technique (in a cross section), and the limited range of capital-output ratios in manufacturing, cannot he decided with confidence.

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