NBER

The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) is a non-profit sponsor of research and conferences in economics and finance and has offices in Cambridge, MA; Palo Alto, CA; and New York, NY. The NBER was founded in 1920 and is devoted to objective quantitative analysis of the American Economy. Its officers are Martin Feldstein, President and CEO and Sam Parker, Director of Finance and Administration. The Board of Directors is Chaired by Paul W. McCracken. The NBER has working groups in corporate finance, asset pricing, behavioral finance and housing (among others) which meet several times a year. Rob Vishny, Graduate School of Business, University of Chicago, organizes the Corporate Finance Group. John Campbell, Department of Economics, Harvard University, organizes the asset pricing group. Richard Thaler organizes the behavioral finance group. Patric Hendershott, Fisher College of Business, Ohio State University, organizes the housing group. The NBER has an excellent working paper series which is searchable from the net. The NBER has been a major repository of economic data over the years and carries some unique resources in finance on its Gopher and through the ICPSR. The NBER maintains an ftp archive and many of the files described below can be obtained there via anonymous ftp from nber.harvard.edu.

Survey of Consumer Finances

The Survey of Consumer Finances is a survey of several thousand individuals carried out every three years by the Federal Reserve Board. This survey is one of the major sources of data on personal finance and carries information about household asset holdings, personal spending patterns and income. The survey oversamples high income individuals and has been used in past research on risk-aversion and asset pricing. Data from the Survey of Consumer Finances can be obtained via ftp from the NBER for 1963, 1983, 1986 and 1989. The 1989 data can be obtained here. You will also need documentation for these files because they are compressed using the UNIX compression program and need to be decompressed prior to use. The 1983 and 86 data can be obtained here. You will also need documentation for these files because they are compressed using the UNIX compression program and need to be decompressed prior to use. The Survey of Consumer Finances has been conducted since 1946 and past files can be obtained from the ICPSR at the University of Michigan. Refer to files 3600-3623 (1946-1961), 7440-7451 (1962-1971), 9687-9689, 9751 (1983), 9752 (1977), 9753 (1986).

Articles which Use the Survey of Consumer Finances

NBER Manufacturing Sector Panel

The NBER Manufacturing Panel contains a subset of Compustat firms from 1959 to 1991. Because this panel is drawn primarily from the Compustat files of Standard and Poors the data are proprietary. Before using these files, you should ascertain that your home institution is a Compustat subscriber. This Panel includes several added and derived variables not on Compustat including measures of R&D stock, patent activity and net plant value adjusted for inflation useful in the computation of Tobin's q-the ratio of the market value of a firm's assets to the replacement value of those assets. To be included in the panel a firm had to exist on Compustat for at least three years between 1976 and 1991. This is a comprehensive universe and has firms with sales in excess of a trillion dollars. The dataset contains approximately 70 variables for each firm year including income statement and balance sheet data.

To obtain the NBER Manufacturing Sector Panel contact Michelle Mains via fax at 510-642-0638. Or write to Professor Bronwyn H. Hall, Dept. of Economics, 549 Evans Hall, #3880,UC Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720-3880. In the past the panel has been available on magnetic tape in EBCDIC or SAS OS format to researchers in the academic community for a $200 reproduction and handling fee for users not associated with the NBER.

You can directly obtain several files related to the NBER Manufacturing Panel described here. These files include

Other Datasets Available Via ftp

You may ftp to ftp.nber.org to obtain the files described below.

NBER Macroeconomic Time Series Data

The NBER Macroeconomic Time Series tapes contain a wealth of historical time series data including past prices for commodities, the stock markets of the US, France, UK and Germany. Much of this cannot be obtained in any other way and goes back into the early 1800s. The dataset is extremely well documented. This is an rich set of data which has not been updated for some time. It is not available on the NBER Gopher but may be ordered from the ICPSR. This collection consists of a massive array of economic time series data pertaining to the United States, United Kingdom, Germany,and France, measuring production, construction, prices, income,employment, inventories, sales, interest rates, money supply, and avariety of other factors. These data were collected by the NationalBureau of Economic Research (NBER) during the past five decades, andconstitute a research resource of major importance to economists as wellas political scientists, sociologists, historians and other scholars. Under a grant from the National Science Foundation, the Consortium and the National Bureau of Economic Research converted this collection (which existed heretofore only on handwritten sheets stored in New York) into fully accessible, readily usable, and completely documented machine-readable form. The NBER collection--now containing an estimated 1.6 million entries--is divided into 16 major categories:

  • Production of Commodities
  • Construction
  • Transportation and Public Utilities
  • Prices
  • Stocks of Commodities
  • Distribution of Commodities
  • Foreign Trade
  • Income and Employment
  • Financial Status of Business
  • Savings and Investment
  • Security Markets
  • Volume ofTransactions
  • Interest Rates
  • Money and Banking
  • Government Finance
  • Indexes of Leading, Coincident and Lagging Indicators
    • Data from all categories are currently available from ICPSR as twenty-four OSIRIS datasets. The economic variables of the datasets are usually observations on the entire nation or large subsets of the nation. Frequently, however, and especially in the United States, separate regional and metropolitan data are included in other variables. This makes cross-sectional analysis possible in many cases. The time span of variables in these files may be as short as one year or as long as 160 years. Chronologically, most data fall within the first half of the twentieth century. Many series, however, extend into the 19th century, and a few reach into the 18th. The oldest series, covering brick production in England and Wales, begins in 1785, and the most recent United States data extend to 1968. Data in the NBER collected were reported at annual, quarterly, or monthly intervals. Most of the data are monthly observations, and practically all monthly variables contain annual values as well. Infrequently, a variable may contain monthly, quarterly, and annual data. Next to monthly series in number are annual series, which contain only annual values. Quarterly series, of which there are relatively few, contain, like the monthly series, implied annual values. Most of the quarterly and monthly data is presented in both original and seasonally-adjusted form. Additional information on the content and characteristics of each series is available from the Center for International Business Cycle Research, Rutgers University, Newark, N.J. 07102.

    Articles which Use or Describe this Data

    NBER Working Papers

    The NBER web site allows you to search for for particular NBER Working Papers and Reprints by keyword(s), author, title or paper number.Papers can be puchased individually for $US5.00 per copy. Subscriptionsare also available in various subject areas. Subscribers receive papers automatically as they are issued - providing the fastest access to the research on a subject. Please contact the Publications Department should you wish to receive more information about subscriptions.For your convenience, we accept Mastercard and Visa. Should you wish to place an order, please contact the Publications Department, NBER, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge MA 02138 by mail, phone 617-868-3900 or FAX (617-868-2742).

    NBER Reporter

    The NBER also releases a quarterly publication called the NBER Reporter which summarizes research in area programs, discussesrecent notable papers, reports on recent conferences, reports Bureau news and profiles members of the NBER. Recent working papers are also summarized. Please contact the Publications Department should you wish to receive a complimentary subscription at Publications, NBER, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge MA 02138 by mail, phone 617-868-3900 or FAX (617-868-2742).

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    This page is maintained by Tim Opler who can be reached at opler.1@osu.edu. Although we will attempt to keep this information accurate, we can not guarantee the accuracy of the information provided.