Gerhard Tintner and O. H. Brownlee, Production Functions Derived from Farm Records—A Correction (1953)

Tintner and Brownlee correct the numerical results of their 1944 farm-production study. The notice identifies computational errors brought to their attention by W. O. Jones:

PROFESSOR W. O. JONES of the Food Research Institute, Stanford University, has kindly pointed out some computational errors which occurred in the article "Production Functions Derived from Farm Records," published in This Journal, August 1944, pp. 566 ff.

Its substantive contribution is a replacement table of estimated marginal productivity per dollar of input, with upper and lower five-percent fiducial limits. The replacement applies to Table 3 on page 569 of the earlier article. The notice also identifies its experiment-station provenance:

Correction of Journal Paper No. J-1227 of the Iowa Agricultural Experiment Station.

The table covers land, labor, improvements, liquid assets, working assets and cash operating expenses for all farms and five farming categories. The corrected aggregate mean for labor is 1.0519, compared with 0.0449 for improvements. The category estimates differ substantially: labor reaches 1.9555 in hog farming but only 0.0361 in dairy farming. Land has a positive lower fiducial limit throughout, whereas the limits for improvements include zero in every category.

The correction supplies revised empirical results without restating the model or explaining the computational errors. These figures qualify the numerical evidence of the earlier article; they should be read as its specific table correction, rather than as a new production theory.