Economic Data as Snapshots in Time

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Economic Data as Snapshots in Time

• Katrina Stierholz
• Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis
• IASSIST Conference
• May 27, 2005

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FRED, FRASER, ALFRED

• FREDeconomic time series database
• FRASERan image archive
• ALFREDreal time economic time series database

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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?

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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

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Finding old revisions

• Press releases
• Economic serial publications (e.g., Economic
  Indicators, Survey of Current Business, and
  Federal Reserve Bulletin)
• They dont have release dates
• But, they do offer a nice snapshot view of the
  economy at a particular moment in time (over the
  course of a week or month)

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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)

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FRASER workflow
Publication
Scanner
TIFF files
File cleaning
OCR
Original TIFF files
PDF files
Archive
http//fraser.stlouisfed.org
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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

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Database construction

• Time as a feature (Snodgrass book)
• Data point
• Time interval
• Validity 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

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Library/Librarian Issues

• Loss of information in paper
• Loss of electronic information
• Consider snapshots
• Consider sending it to us

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http//research.stlouisfed.org

• Please contact me at
• Katrina.L.Stierholz_at_stls.frb.org