FRED

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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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.