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📌 All Federal Reserve data is now available on FRED: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/collection/federal-reserve-board-data

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Key Data Categories on FRED

• Money, Banking & Finance: Interest rates, money supply, bank lending, financial conditions.
• National Accounts: GDP, personal income, corporate profits, consumer spending (from BEA NIPA tables).
• Population, Employment, Labor Markets: Unemployment rate, employment levels, wage growth, labor force participation (from BLS).
• Prices: CPI, PCE deflator, PPI, inflation expectations.
• Income Distribution & Poverty: Gini coefficient, income shares by quintile, poverty rates.
• International Data: Exchange rates, trade balances, foreign interest rates.

How to Find and Use FRED Series

Step 1 — Search by keyword: Use the FRED search bar to find series by topic (e.g., "union membership," "corporate profits," "median wage"). Each series has a unique ID (e.g., UNRATE for the unemployment rate).

Step 2 — Customize the graph: FRED's graph tool lets you add multiple series, adjust date ranges, convert to percent change or index, and apply a deflator to get real values. Use Edit Graph > Add Line to overlay multiple series.

Step 3 — Download the data: Click Download to export as Excel, CSV, or JSON. Data can also be embedded as an interactive chart.

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Frequently used series IDs:

• UNRATE — Unemployment rate (BLS)
• MEHOINUSA672N — Real median household income (Census)
• A4102C1A027NBEA — Corporate profits after tax (BEA)
• LNS11300000 — Labor force participation rate (BLS)
• GINI — Gini coefficient for U.S. income inequality
• DPCERAM1M225NBEA — Real personal consumption expenditures </aside>

Using FRED for Economic Policy Research

FRED is especially powerful for longitudinal analysis — tracking how a variable has changed over business cycles, across administrations, or in response to policy shocks. Some common research tasks:

• Documenting a trend: Pull a 40-year wage series and annotate with recession shading (built into FRED graph tool).

• Comparing two variables: Overlay labor share of income with corporate profits to show distributional shifts.

• Getting real values: Apply the PCE deflator in FRED to convert any nominal series to real values without leaving the platform.

• State-level data: Many BLS and Census series are available at the state level on FRED — filter by geography when searching.

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