| The Research Division's goal is to promote
quality economic research and contribute to economic policy discussions
while expanding the frontier of economic knowledge around the globe
in the areas of money and banking, macroeconomics, and international
and regional economics. |
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| ALFRED® is a collection of vintage
versions of U.S. economic data. Economic data for past observation periods are often revised as more accurate
estimates become available. As a result, previous vintages of data can be superseded and may no longer be
available. ALFRED makes it possible to gather data as reported by a source on past dates in history. |
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| CASSIDI® provides nationwide data
on banking market structures and definitions, as well as banking markets for individual depository institutions; users
can perform "what if" (pro forma) analyses to see how potential mergers or acquisitions could affect market
structures and competition. |
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| In January 2005, the Research Division
of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis established its Center
for Regional Economics - 8th District (CRE8®). The role
of CRE8® is to provide and facilitate rigorous economic analysis
of policy issues affecting local, state, and regional economies -
particularly those in the 8th Federal Reserve District. |
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| FRASER®
is the newest project to expand our mission of providing economic
information and data to researchers interested in the U.S. economy.
On this web site you will find links to scanned images (in Adobe®
Acrobat® PDF format) of historical economic statistical publications,
releases, and documents. |
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| GeoFRED™ is our data-mapping tool, which displays
color-coded data on the state, MSA, and county levels. For example, GeoFRED can display unemployment, labor force, and population
for all U.S. counties. Users can select among 12,000 FRED® data series and customize these printable
maps according to size, scope, and detail. |
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| Liber8™ is a
portal that links to economic information from the Federal Reserve System, government agencies,
and international data sources. Liber8 was designed with university reference and
government documents librarians, college and high school students, and teachers in mind. |
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In ALFRED Graph you can now create graphs of real time economic data by choosing vintage dates. In addition on each series page is a graph of the last 2
vintages which shows the most recent revisions. (2008-04-22) More...
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Create economic time series data sets and make them publicly available. Possible uses include teachers sharing data lists with students and researchers including links to data lists in bibliographies.
(2008-04-07) More...
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The St. Louis Fed has a new president: James B. Bullard, Ph.D. Bullard, currently vice president and deputy director of research for monetary analysis in the Bank's Research division, will assume his new position on Tuesday, April 1, 2008.
(2008-03-25) More...
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U.S. Financial Data, May 9 Issue
A weekly publication that includes charts and tables relating to weekly monetary and reserve aggregates, selected interest rates, commercial bank loans, and more.
(2008-05-08) More USFD ...
National Economic Trends, May Issue
A monthly publication that presents a snapshot of the U.S. economy. The cover article is "Boom & Gloom in Housing Markets: The Sequel " (PDF) by Carlos Garriga.
(2008-05-02) More NET ...
International Economic Trends, May Issue
A quarterly publication that includes economic statistics and charts for G-7 and euro area countries. The cover article is "The Sovereign Wealth Funds of Nations" (PDF) by Christopher J. Neely.
(2008-04-28) More IET ...
Monetary Trends, May Issue
A monthly publication that reviews U.S. monetary and financial conditions with an emphasis on various measures of the monetary policy stance. The cover article is "New Monetary Policy Tools?" (PDF) by Riccardo DiCecio and Charles S. Gascon.
(2008-04-16) More MT ...
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"The Federal Response to Home Mortgage Distress: Lessons from the Great Depression"
by David C. Wheelock
This article examines the federal response to mortgage distress during the Great Depression: It documents features of the housing cycle of the 1920s and early 1930s, focusing on the growth of mortgage debt and the subsequent sharp increase in mortgage defaults and foreclosures during the Depression. It summarizes the major federal initiatives to reduce foreclosures and reform mortgage market practices, focusing especially on the activities of the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC), which acquired and refinanced one million delinquent mortgages between 1933 and 1936. Because the conditions under which the HOLC operated were unusual, the author cautions against drawing strong policy lessons from the HOLC’s activities. Nonetheless, similarities between the Great Depression and the recent episode suggest that a review of the historical experience can provide insights about alternative policies to relieve mortgage distress.
"FOMC Consensus Forecasts"
by William T. Gavin and Geetanjali Pande
In November 2007, the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) announced a change in the way it communicates its view of the economic outlook: It increased the frequency of its forecasts from two to four times per year, and it increased the length of the forecasting horizon from two to three years. The FOMC does not release the individual members’ forecasts or standard measures of consensus such as the mean or median. Rather, it continues to release the forecast information as a range of forecasts, both the full range between the high and the low and a central tendency that omits the extreme values. This paper uses individual forecaster data from the Survey of Professional Forecasters (SPF) to mimic the FOMC’s method for creating their central tendency. The authors show that the midpoint of the central tendency of the SPF is a reliable measure of the consensus, suggesting that the FOMC reporting method is also a reliable measure of consensus. For the dates when both are available, the authors also compare the relative forecast accuracy of the FOMC and SPF consensus forecasts for output growth and inflation. Overall, the differences in forecast accuracy are too small to be statistically significant.
"Laffer Traps and Monetary Policy"
by Patrick A. Pintus
This article focuses on the interaction, in a stylized economy with flexible prices, of monetary and fiscal policy when both are active—active in the sense that how the policy instrument is set depends on the state of the economy. Fiscal policy finances a given stream of government expenditures through distortionary labor taxes, and it operates under a strict balanced-budget rule. If monetary policy is passive, the economy may occasionally switch, because of self-fulfilling expectations, from the neighborhood of a “Laffer trap” equilibrium to the saddle-path leading to the high-welfare steady state. In the low-welfare stationary state, output, investment, and consumption are low while the tax rate is correspondingly high. However, active monetary policy may, by following a rule such that the nominal interest rate responds positively to the state of the economy, push the economy toward the high-welfare equilibrium and rule out expectation-driven business cycles.
"Forecasting Inflation and Output: Comparing Data-Rich Models with Simple Rules"
by William T. Gavin and Kevin L. Kliesen
There has been a resurgence of interest in dynamic factor models for use by policy advisors. Dynamic factor methods can be used to incorporate a wide range of economic information when forecasting or measuring economic shocks. This article introduces dynamic factor models that underlie the data-rich methods and also tests whether the data-rich models can help a benchmark autoregressive model forecast alternative measures of inflation and real economic activity at horizons of 3, 12, and 24 months ahead. The authors find that, over the past decade, the data-rich models significantly
improve the forecasts for a variety of real output and inflation indicators. For all the series that they examine, the authors find that the data-rich models become more useful when forecasting over longer horizons. The exception is the unemployment rate, where the principal components provide significant forecasting information at all horizons.
More Review Articles ...
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CPI Graph - Latest Revisions