Reference
Data Sources
Nearly every figure quoted in an economic news story originates in a public database that anyone can open. This page lists the main ones, with a note on what each is actually good for. Going to the source takes a few minutes and settles most arguments faster than reading a second article about the same release.
Start here
FRED — maintained by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Hundreds of thousands of economic time series from dozens of national and international sources, all plottable in a browser and downloadable as spreadsheets. If you only ever use one tool from this page, use this one: it defeats several of the misreadings listed in our report on recurring statistical errors simply by making long-run charts trivial to produce.
National statistics
- Bureau of Labor Statistics — employment, unemployment, wages, consumer and producer prices, productivity. Its Handbook of Methods is the best free explanation anywhere of how labour and price statistics are actually collected.
- Bureau of Economic Analysis — the national accounts: gross domestic product, personal income, trade in goods and services, and the industry breakdowns behind them.
- Census Bureau economic indicators — retail sales, housing starts, durable goods, business formation and the monthly trade figures.
- Federal Reserve statistical releases — interest rates, bank credit, household balance sheets and the flow of funds.
Energy and environment
- Energy Information Administration — production, consumption, prices and stocks for every fuel, plus the decomposition of a retail fuel price into crude, refining, distribution and tax.
- International Energy Agency — comparable international energy series and long-horizon outlooks.
- EPA environmental economics — the guidelines and working papers behind United States regulatory cost-benefit analysis, including its treatment of discounting.
Public finance
- Congressional Budget Office — budget baselines, cost estimates and long-term projections, with the sensitivity analyses that are usually the most informative pages in any fiscal report.
- Government Accountability Office — audits and long-run fiscal outlooks produced on an independent methodology.
- Treasury fiscal data — the debt, receipts and outlays as recorded, rather than as projected.
International
- International Monetary Fund — cross-country macroeconomic and balance-of-payments data.
- World Bank Open Data — long development and national-accounts series for most countries.
- OECD Data — harmonised statistics for member economies, useful because the definitions are made comparable.
- World Trade Organization statistics — merchandise and services trade flows and tariff schedules.
Research
- National Bureau of Economic Research — the working-paper series where most empirical economics appears first, and the committee that dates United States business cycles.
- The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics — short signed entries on core concepts, written for non-specialists.
- Federal Reserve Education and the St. Louis Fed education portal — free classroom-grade material on money, banking and monetary policy.
- Investor.gov — plain-language explanations of financial instruments and market mechanics from the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Using them well
Three habits do most of the work. Check the vintage of what you are looking at — first estimates and revised figures are different data. Check whether a series is nominal or real, and whether it is seasonally adjusted; both are usually offered and mixing them produces nonsense. And read the technical notes once for any series you expect to use repeatedly, since a definition read once saves a great deal of confusion later.
See also the reading list for book-length treatments and Quotations for the arguments in their original words.