Name: NBER Macrohistory Database
Creator: Kaggle
License: https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/

About this Dataset

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?

Tables

Data

@kaggle.sohier_nber_macrohistory_database.data

2.1 MB
817,857 rows
3 columns

CREATE TABLE data (
  "date" TIMESTAMP,
  "value" DOUBLE,
  "variable" VARCHAR
);

Documentation

@kaggle.sohier_nber_macrohistory_database.documentation

1.1 MB
3,493 rows
4 columns

CREATE TABLE documentation (
  "file_name" VARCHAR,
  "description" VARCHAR,
  "documentation" VARCHAR,
  "chapter" BIGINT
);