Every time you buy a can of tuna or a new television, its bar code is scanned to record its price and other information. These "scanner data" offer a number of attractive features for economists and statisticians, because they are collected continuously, are available quickly, and record prices...

There is policy interest in factoring productivity growth into technical progress and returns to scale components. Our approach uses exact index number methods to reduce the parameters that must be estimated, and allows us to exploit the cross-sectional dimension of plant-level panel data. We...