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Economic Data as Snapshots in Time. Katrina Stierholz Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis IASSIST Conference May 27, 2005. FRED, FRASER, & ALFRED. FRED—economic time series database FRASER—an image archive ALFRED—real time economic time series database. 1Q2004 GDP revisions. - PowerPoint PPT Presentation
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Economic Data as Snapshots in Time
Katrina StierholzFederal Reserve Bank of St. LouisIASSIST ConferenceMay 27, 2005
FRED, FRASER, & ALFRED
FRED—economic time series database
FRASER—an image archive
ALFRED—real time economic time series database
1Q2004 GDP revisions
April 29, 2004 First quarter “advance” GDP is issued (increased 4.2%)
May 27, 2004 First quarter “preliminary” GDP is issued (increased 4.4%)
June 25, 2004 First quarter “final” GDP is issued (increased 3.9%)
July 30, 2004 First quarter GDP is revised to 4.5% (as part of the annual revision)
June 2005 the next annual revision will be released, revising the number again… and did I mention benchmarks?
Real-Time Data
Represents the data at a particular point in time
Useful for replication studies, forecast models, evaluating policy decisions (historical), understanding the scope of revisions for various data series
First release information available in press releases
Finding old revisions
Press releases Economic serial publications (e.g.,
Economic Indicators, Survey of Current Business, and Federal Reserve Bulletin)They don’t have release datesBut, they do offer a nice “snapshot” view of
the economy at a particular moment in time (over the course of a week or month)
FRASER
Images Part of GPO digitization project Features
Linked tables OCRd material SuDoc numbers added Searchable High quality scanning Low-cost way of providing this information
OCR cannot be extracted (it is uncorrected)
FRASER workflowPublication
ScannerTIFF files
PDF files
http://fraser.stlouisfed.org
File cleaningOCR
Archive
Original TIFF files
ALFRED
Much more sophisticated (interface and user)
Data will go back to December 1996, in the first release (July 2005)
25 major data series have been gathered back to the beginning of their release
Database construction
Time as a feature (Snodgrass book) Data point
Time intervalValidity interval
Only twice as many data points as current FRED database.
Will live within FRED, for a while, later it will be a separate site
Library/Librarian Issues
Loss of information in paper Loss of electronic information Consider snapshots Consider sending it to us
http://research.stlouisfed.orgPlease contact me at:
Katrina.L.Stierholz@stls.frb.org
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