Macroeconomic resources for students

Data and analysis for countries is available from governments, international agencies, and commercial sources, including many of the leading international financial institutions. Some of our favorites are listed below. Most are free to all, the rest are free via NYU licenses. In most cases, access to licensed material is automatic from an NYU IP address; if you're an NYU student working outside NYU, go through NYU's Virtual Business Library, which will ask you to log in using your NYU id and pw.

The essentials

If you're looking for macroeconomic data, the most user-friendly sources are the St Louis Fed's FRED (extensive US data, growing collection of international data, somewhat disorganized structure) and the World Bank's World Development Indicators (extensive economic and social indicators for virtually all countries, great interface). For country analysis, the EIU's Country Intelligence offers reports on a diverse collection of topics (economics, politics, finance). The first two are free, the third is available through NYU's license.

Keep in mind: Links to vendors are quirky, particularly if you are not accessing them from an NYU ip address. If a link fails, or asks you for money, try going through the Virtual Business Library. For example, to access the EIU's Country Intelligence, go to the VBL, click on Country Information, and follow instructions from there.

News and commentary

Macroeconomic data and analysis (beyond the essentials)

Software

We've written programs, mostly in Stata and R, that automate data download from common online sources. If you're interested, let us know -- we'll probably be ready to share them in a few months. And if you'd like to contribute to the project, let us know that, too.

(c) NYU Stern School of Business | Address comments to Dave Backus.