FRED-MD and FRED-QD: Monthly and Quarterly Databases for Macroeconomic Research

FRED-MD and FRED-QD are large macroeconomic databases designed for the empirical analysis of “big data.” The datasets of monthly and quarterly observations mimic the coverage of datasets already used in the literature, but they add three appealing features. They are updated in real-time through the FRED database. They are publicly accessible, facilitating the replication of empirical work. And they relieve the researcher of the task of incorporating data changes and revisions (a task accomplished by the Data Desk at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

The accompanying papers shows that factors extracted from the FRED-MD and FRED-QD datasets share comparable information content to various vintages of so-called Stock-Watson datasets. These factor estimates are shown to be useful for forecasting a wide range of macroeconomic series. In addition, we find that diffusion indexes constructed as the partial sum of the factor estimates can potentially be useful for the study of business cycle chronology.

FRED-MD

FRED-MD Working Paper (PDF)
FRED-MD Appendix (.zip)
Changes to FRED-MD (PDF)
Historical Vintages of FRED-MD 1999-08 to 2014-12 (.zip 45 MB)
All Post-2015 Vintages of FRED-MD (.zip)

FRED-QD

FRED-QD Working Paper (PDF)
FRED-QD Appendix (.zip)
Changes to FRED-QD (PDF)
All Post-2018 Vintages of FRED-QD (.zip)

Code

FRED-Databases Matlab code (.zip )
R Package to read QD and MD data and compute factors (third-party software, external link)

FRED-MD: Monthly Data

current.csv
2024-11.csv
2024-10.csv
2024-09.csv
2024-08.csv
2024-07.csv
2024-06.csv

FRED-QD: Quarterly Data

current.csv
2024-11.csv
2024-10.csv
2024-09.csv
2024-08.csv
2024-07.csv
2024-06.csv

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