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| There are thousands of sites offering macroeconomic data on the internet. The lists below are a selection from those that I have found most useful. |
| For additional sources of economic information, an extremely useful starting point is Bill Goffe's Resources for Economists, which is sponsored by the American Economic Association. |
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| By R. Mark Rogers, this site is a companion to his book "The Handbook of Key Economic Indicators." The site provides well-maintained links to a lot of macro data, with an emphasis on recent statistics. His links are organized into various sections: Monetary and Fiscal Policy Links, Interest Rates and Currency Exchange Rates, U.S. Statistical or Economic Policy Departments and Agencies, Federal Reserve System and Non-U.S. Central Banks, and International Statistical or Economic Policy Agencies. |
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| Perhaps the most important data on the U.S. economy is found here: the National Income and Products Account (NIPA). There are both current and historical NIPA data -- quarterly from 1946, and annual from 1929. They also offer extensive international data (Balance of Payments, Exports and Imports, Investment Position, U.S Direct Investment Abroad, and Foreign Direct Investment in the United States) from recent years in a variety of formats. Data can be retrieved for specific times and frequencies. |
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| The BLS produces a wealth of data, especially on employment, prices and wages. |
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| Bets known for production of the copyrighted Index of Consumer Expectations, this site details the many components of the index, and provides an analysis of the latest monthly survey data. |
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| The Federal Reserve System consists of the Board of Governors in Washington, DC, and 12 regional banks. Each of these has its own web site, with extensive macroeconomic information. Among these, the most convenient source of macroeconomic data is the FRED Economic Time-Series Database. For a list of links to all branch banks, with some description of what they have to offer, go here. |
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| This site is part of the "Economy.com" web site. As its name implies, it offer data at no charge. At last count, they offered more than one million different economic and financial time series. One can either use their search facility or move through their directory. Charts of the selected data can be generated, and the data can be downloaded in spreadsheet format. They have a shopping basket that holds multiple series. To access all this stuff, however, you need to register. |
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| During the first several decades of its existence, the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) assembled an extensive data set that covers all aspects of the pre-WWI and interwar economies, including production, construction, employment, money, prices, asset market transactions, foreign trade, and government activity. Many series are highly disaggregated, and many exist att the monthly or quarterly frequency. The data set has some coverage of the United Kingdom, France and Germany, although it predominantly covers the United States. |
| The data files are offered in two ASCII formats: Micro-TSP .db format and rectangular .dat format. For most users, the .dat format is best. The rectangular .dat format makes reading the data using general-purpose statistical software packages easier. The comment lines have been extracted from the data and placed into accompanying .txt files. The rectangular .dat files have a column for the year, a column for the quarter or month, if necessary, and a column of data. Missing codesare written as "." The comment lines are placed in an accompanying .txt file. |
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| There are too many sources to merit listing here. Bill Goffe's Resources for Economists page provides a very helpful annotated listing. |
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| A very important source for international macroeconomic data is the Penn World Tables. These data contain data for 152 countries and 29 subjects, covering the period 1950-1992 (most extensive coverage is 1960 through 1990). For reasons we will discuss later in the course, making income comparisons across countries is exteremely problematic. These data utiolize metholdogies to allow international comparisons to be made. The data were prepared by Alan Heston and Robert Summers of the University of Pennsylvania, Daniel A. Nuxoll of the Virginia Polytechnic Institute, and Bettina Aten of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, with the research assistance of Valerie Mercer, James Walsh, and Bao Truong. |
| The Penn World Tables can be found in many locations. If you go elsewhere, make sure you get version 5.6 which contains numerous corrections, especially to the US data. Goffe writes about the University of Toronto's presentation of the data in glowing terms: "This organization, which for a fee also makes available the Canadian CANSIM database, demonstrates how the web can make it very easy to retrieve economic data across the Internet. With your browser, you can very easily select and retrieve individual or multiple series from this database (in formats for most any statistical program), or plot them interactively. It sets the standard for data retrieval on the Internet" |