DOI: 10.3886/icpsr07644.v1
title: Macroeconomic Time Series for the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, and France
title: Version 1

description: This collection contains an array of economic time series data pertaining to the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, and France, primarily between the 1920s and the 1960s, and including some time series from the 18th and 19th centuries. These data were collected by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), and they constitute a research resource of importance to economists as well as to political scientists, sociologists, and historians. Under a grant from the National Science Foundation, ICPSR 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 -- containing an estimated 1.6 million entries -- is divided into 16 major categories: (1) construction, (2) prices, (3) security markets, (4) foreign trade, (5) income and employment, (6) financial status of business, (7) volume of transactions, (8) government finance, (9) distribution of commodities, (10) savings and investments, (11) transportation and public utilities, (12) stocks of commodities, (13) interest rates, and (14) indices of leading, coincident, and lagging indicators, (15) money and banking, and (16) production of commodities. Data from all categories are available in Parts 1-22. The economic variables 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. Most data pertain to the first half of the 20th 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. The unit of analysis is an interval of time -- a year, a quarter, or a month. The bulk of observations are monthly, and most series of monthly data contain annual values or totals.
description: ICPSR data undergo a confidentiality review and are altered when necessary to limit the risk of disclosure. ICPSR also routinely creates ready-to-go data files along with setups in the major statistical software formats as well as standard codebooks to accompany the data. In addition to these procedures, ICPSR performed the following processing steps for this data collection: Performed consistency checks.; Standardized missing values.; Checked for undocumented or out-of-range codes..
description: Datasets: 
 
 DS0: Study-Level Files 
 DS1: Construction, Dataset 02A 
 DS2: Construction, Dataset 02B 
 DS3: Construction, Dataset 02C 
 DS4: Prices, Dataset 04A 
 DS5: Prices, Dataset 04B 
 DS6: Security Markets, Dataset 11A 
 DS7: Foreign Trade, Dataset 07A 
 DS8: Income and Employment, Dataset 08A 
 DS9: Income and Employment, Dataset 08B 
 DS10: Income and Employment, Dataset 08C 
 DS11: Financial Status of Business, Dataset 09A 
 DS12: Volume of Transactions, Dataset 12A 
 DS13: Government Finance, Dataset 15A 
 DS14: Distribution of Commodities, Dataset 06A 
 DS15: Savings and Investments, Dataset 10A 
 DS16: Transportation and Public Utilities, Dataset 03A 
 DS17: Stocks of Commodities, Dataset 05A 
 DS18: Interest Rates, Dataset 13A 
 DS19: Indexes of Leading, Coincident, and Lagging Indicators, Dataset 16A 
 DS20: Money and Banking, Dataset 14A 
 DS21: Production of Commodities, Dataset 01A 
 DS22: Production of Commodities, Dataset 01B
description: The data were collected between the 1920s and the 1970s, but it is unclear from the documentation as to the exact start and end dates.
description: Time series of economic statistics pertaining to France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States between 1785 and 1968.