Federal Reserve Economic Data on arvau

Wikipedia / Federal Reserve Economic Data

Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED) is a database maintained by the Research Division of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis that provides access to more than 816,000 economic time series from hundreds of public and private sources. The database includes data on banking, business and fiscal conditions, consumer price indexes, employment and population, exchange rates, gross domestic product, interest rates, monetary aggregates, producer price indexes, reserves and monetary base, U.S. trade and international transactions, and financial markets. FRED aggregates data from U.S. government agencies, state institutions, universities, nonprofit organizations, trade associations, and private companies, including sources such as the United States Census Bureau, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Zillow, and the National Association of Realtors.

History

FRED was created by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis to improve public access to economic and financial data. Over time, the platform expanded from a relatively small collection of U.S. macroeconomic indicators into a large-scale aggregation service containing domestic and international economic data from hundreds of providers.

The platform is widely used by economists, researchers, journalists, students, policymakers, and participants in financial markets for economic analysis and forecasting.

Data organization

FRED organizes economic information primarily as time series ("series") consisting of dated observations. Series are associated with statistical releases and data sources, while categories and tags provide systems for browsing and metadata classification.Categories form a hierarchical browsing structure, while tags provide non-hierarchical metadata relationships across series. Individual series may appear in multiple categories and may be associated with numerous tags.

Services

ALFRED

ALFRED (Archival Federal Reserve Economic Data) provides access to vintage versions of economic data that were available at specific points in time. The service allows researchers to examine historical revisions to economic statistics and reproduce analyses using data available at earlier dates.

GeoFRED

GeoFRED is a geographic mapping tool that displays selected FRED data series using color-coded visualizations at the state, metropolitan statistical area, and county levels.

FRASER

FRASER (Federal Reserve Archival System for Economic Research) is a digital archive created by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis to preserve and provide access to historical economic publications and documents related to the history of the United States financial system and the Federal Reserve System.

The archive includes:

Publications of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors
Publications of Federal Reserve Banks
Speeches and archival materials of Federal Reserve policymakers
Government statistical publications
Congressional hearings
Economic reports and books

FRASER was developed in collaboration with libraries, government agencies, and academic institutions.

CASSIDI

CASSIDI is a data service that provides information about banking market structures, banking markets, and depository institutions within the United States.

IDEAS and RePEc integration

The St. Louis Fed Research division also hosts IDEAS, a bibliographic database associated with Research Papers in Economics (RePEc), which indexes economic research papers, articles, and working papers from academic and research institutions worldwide.

Usage and influence

FRED data are widely used in academic research, financial markets, journalism, and public policy analysis. The platform is commonly used for economic forecasting, macroeconomic analysis, and reproducible research.

The availability of machine-readable data and public APIs has contributed to the widespread adoption of FRED within quantitative finance, economics, and data science communities.

In a 2012 Business Insider article, economist Paul Krugman described FRED as an essential tool for real-time economic analysis.

API and software ecosystem

FRED provides a public web API that allows users to programmatically access economic data and metadata published through the platform. The API follows a REST architecture and returns data in formats including JSON and XML. Access requires registration for an API key used to authenticate requests.

The API supports retrieval of time series observations, releases, categories, tags, and related metadata associated with FRED datasets. Users may query individual series, filter observations by date ranges, and retrieve metadata describing data sources, units, frequencies, and seasonal adjustment methods.

The FRED API has supported the development of third-party libraries, integrations, and open-source software for statistical and programming environments including R, Python, Ruby, Julia, and command-line interfaces. Examples include fredr, an R package used for economic data analysis, and RESERVE, an open-source command-line interface for interacting with the FRED API.

The API is widely used by researchers, analysts, developers, and financial market participants to integrate economic data into statistical software, forecasting systems, financial models, and research applications.

The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis provides citation guidelines for FRED data and associated metadata.