NBER Macrohistory Database

Context

This data set 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 at 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. For information see:

• Improving the Accessibility of the NBER's Historical Data , by Daniel Feenberg and Jeff Miron. (NBER Working Paper #5186). Published in the Journal of Business and Economic Statistics, Volume 15 Number 3 (July 1997) pages 293-299.

Information about seasonal adjustments is available, but in most cases only unadjusted series have been made available here.

Content

The data.csv is organized in a long format with columns for the date, variable, and value. The dates are always the beginning of period date for whatever period existed in the original data. This means that '1920' was converted to January 1st, 1920 while Q2 1920 was converted to April 1, 1920. This is intended as a convenience to make it easier to work with multiple time series from the original mixed frequency data.

The data is currently organized into 16 chapters:

• Chapter1: Production of Commodities
• Chapter2: Construction
• Chapter3: Transportation and Public Utilities
• Chapter4: Prices
• Chapter5: Stocks of Commodities
• Chapter6: Distribution of Commodities
• Chapter7: Foreign Trade
• Chapter8: Income and Employment
• Chapter9: Financial Status of Business
• Chapter10: Savings and Investment
• Chapter11: Security Markets
• Chapter12: Volume of Transactions
• Chapter13: Interest Rates
• Chapter14: Money and Banking
• Chapter15: Government and Finance
• Chapter16: Leading Indicators

The dataset has been transformed from its original format. You can find the data preparation code here.

Acknowledgements

This dataset was kindly made available by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). You can find the original dataset here.

Inspiration

• Which major historical events can you detect from the data?
• With roughly 3,500 time series in the dataset, finding relevant information can be challenging. Can you find a better way of organizing or indexing the data?