FRED – Economist Writing Every Day

Where are the Elderly Workers? Still around, just older.

September 5, 2025September 4, 2025Zachary BartschLeave a comment

I’m piggy-backing off of the FRED blog and off of Jeremy’s post with yet more data. Let’s set the stage.

FRED blog, using BLS data from the Current Population Survey (CPS), shows that the labor force participation rate (LFPR) fell by about 1.4pp for people 55 years and older between 2017 & 2023. CPS data is released quickly, but the sample sizes are not massive. There are 3.4 million people in the 7 years of monthly data (so, a little over 40k people age 55+ per monthly observation).
Also using CPS data, Jeremy shows that FRED commits the fallacy of composition because there are very different people who are 55 and older. Specifically, he illustrates that the LFPR for people ages 55-64 have experienced about a 1.3pp *higher* LFPR in 2023 vs 2017. The implication is that something is happening to the people older than 64.
I use annual CPS instead. Why? Because it can be corroborated with the annual American Community Survey (ACS) data for 2017-2023.

Easy FRED Stata Data

July 28, 2023July 28, 2023Zachary Bartsch1 Comment

Lot’s of economists use FRED – that’s Federal Reserve Economic Data for the uninitiated. It’s super easy to use for basic queries, data transformations, graphs, and even maps. Downloading a single data series or even the same series for multiple geographic locations is also easy. But downloading distinct data series can be a hassle.

I’ve written previously about how the Excel add-on makes getting data more convenient. One of the problems with the Excel add-on is that locating the appropriate series can be difficult – I recommend using the FRED website to query data and then use the Excel add-on to obtain it. One major flaw is how the data is formatted in excel. A separate column of dates is downloaded for each series and the same dates aren’t aligned with one another. Further, re-downloading the data with small changes is almost impossible.

Only recently have I realized that there is an alternative that is better still! Stata has access to the FRED API and can import data sets directly in to its memory. There are no redundant date variables and the observations are all aligned by date.

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In Praise of the FRED Excel Add-in

April 22, 2022April 22, 2022Zachary Bartsch2 Comments

Sometimes, large entities have enough money to throw at a problem that by sheer magnitude they produce something great (albeit at too high a cost). The iPhone app from the FRED is not that thing. But the Excel add-in is something that every macroeconomics professor should consider adding to their toolkit.

Personally, I include links to FRED content in the lecture notes that I provide to students. But FRED makes it easy to do so much more. They now have an add-in that makes accessing data *much* faster. With it, professors can demonstrate in excel their transformations that students can easily replicate. The advantage is that students can learn to access and transform their own data rather than relying on links that I provide them.

The tool is easy enough to find – FRED wants you to use it. After that, the installation is largely automatic.