Historical International Macro-Finance Data Sources

TL;DR

Historical international macro-finance research can draw on readily available trade datasets and original government reports, while researchers can also build datasets from scanned publications. The material highlights three country-level bilateral trade panels, industry-level data, and the RICardo project’s minimally transformed CSV files. It also explains why combining sources improves coverage, especially beyond Europe and North America. Read on for practical guidance on choosing, checking, and extending historical data.

Transcript

[MUSIC] Thanks a lot. This is super exciting to be here so I'm going to talk about historical data and I'll be covering a lot of topics. So mostly, I'll be going through readily available data. So these are data sets that you can pretty much plug and play, download, work with and I'll discuss ways you can work with them and issues that you might co... Read More

Key Insights

• 👨‍🔬 Historical data in international finance research provides valuable insights into past events, comparative advantage, and the growth of major economies.
• 💐 Available trade data includes bilateral country-level panels and industry-level datasets, while capital flow datasets cover securities prices, sovereign debt, and international banking flows.
• 😒 Researchers can access macroeconomic data, historical events, and use central bank websites as valuable resources for their research.
• 🧑‍🦽 Creating your own datasets requires manual digitization for quantitative data and OCR with additional processing for textual data.

Questions & Answers

Q: What historical international macro-finance data sources are available to researchers?

Researchers can use bilateral country-level aggregate trade panels, industry-level trade datasets, and original government reports compiled into statistical abstracts. The discussion also identifies scanned historical publications and the RICardo project’s CSV files as accessible sources.

Q: Why should researchers study historical data in international finance?

Historical data covers rare periods of large international capital and goods flows as well as their crashes. It can help researchers test theories about how international systems work and inspire new theories based on important past events.

Q: What information do bilateral country-level trade panels contain?

These panels contain bilateral flows between countries, including exports and imports. They are described as very complete and suitable for projects that require country-level aggregate trade data.

Q: How does industry-level historical trade data differ from country-level panels?

Industry-level data examines the underlying characteristics of aggregate trade flows in greater detail. Because collecting flows across countries and industries greatly increases dimensionality, coverage is not available worldwide, although researchers who assembled such datasets are described as willing to share well-documented data.

Q: What is distinctive about the RICardo project’s trade data?

RICardo aims to preserve the underlying sources by minimizing aggregation across borders and currency conversion. It turns scanned PDFs into CSV files, which provides flexibility but requires researchers to do more preparation themselves.

Q: Why should researchers combine multiple historical trade datasets?

A single source may differ from others in data construction choices and geographic or temporal coverage. Combining sources can improve coverage, particularly for regions outside Europe and North America and for research focused on the fringes of the international economy.

Q: Where can researchers find additional undigitized historical trade data?

Original government publications and statistical abstracts often contain unexplored, undigitized information beyond the trade statistics already extracted into datasets. Many such publications have been scanned by Google Books or Hafi Trust, making them easier to access.

Q: What decisions arise when combining historical trade datasets?

Researchers must decide how to define the unit of observation because country borders and political entities change over time. Those choices can alter conclusions about measures such as the extensive margin of trade, so the datasets cannot simply be merged without adjustment.

Summary & Key Takeaways

• The content discusses the importance of studying historical data as a source of inspiration and understanding for testing theories of how systems work in international finance.

• It provides detailed information on readily available data sets, such as bilateral country-level aggregate trade panels and industry-level trade data, and highlights the advantages and challenges of working with these data.

• The content also explores datasets for capital flows, including securities price data, sovereign debt data, and international banking data.

• Additionally, it mentions the availability of macroeconomic data and resources for accessing historical events, such as financial crises and major disasters.

• The content concludes with an explanation of the process of creating your own datasets, including digitization of tables and OCR for textual data.