Soon after the creation of the Federal Reserve System in 1913, the Board of Governors started publishing extensive statistical data on the United States economy and its banking system. This early statistical work, which preceded the U.S. national accounts, has continued through today. In this note, we describe the history of the Federal Reserve Board statistical publications presented in FEDS Paper 2016-016.

While the Board of Governors has published extensive data on a continuous basis over the last century, this information has been made available to the public in various formats. In the early years of the Federal Reserve, statistical data were published either as individual releases or as part of the monthly Federal Reserve Bulletin. Some of these data were then compiled in the Board's annual reports. Later on, the Board gathered its major series relating to banking, monetary, and financial developments--including revisions to previously published data--in two volumes, Banking and Monetary Statistics 1914-1941 and 1941-1970. These volumes made it easier for researchers to find, in one convenient location, data that had previously been published in various places and formats. Between 1970 and 2000, the Board continued to assemble and update its most important series in a single volume, called the Annual Statistical Digest from 1970 to 1995 and the Statistical Digest from 1996 to 2000. The Digest included even more series than the Banking and Monetary Statistics. More recently, with widespread usage of the Internet, statistical releases have been published at the Board's public website. Additionally, at the time of the Federal Reserve's centennial celebration, the Federal Reserve Archival System for Economic Research (FRASER) made publicly available an extensive collection of the Board's statistical releases in digital format. The work presented in FEDS Paper 2016-016 uses all these historical publications and other information to trace down the titles and release numbers of the statistical data published by the Board of Governors since 1914.

The majority of the Board's statistical releases are numbered, using an alphanumeric reference, such as C.7.3 or G.17.² While we are not aware of any written record describing the reasons for choosing specific release numbers, some seem to follow a particular pattern. For instance, the statistical releases with numbers that start with the letter "E" are generally published on a quarterly or semiannual frequency, those that start with the letter "G" are generally monthly, and those starting with "H" are generally weekly. Before 1946, the Board of Governors used a different nomenclature for numbering its releases: "B" or "FR," followed by a number.

In addition to the nomenclature change in 1946, most of the Board's statistical releases have experienced various other changes in their titles and numbers over time. For example, as depicted in figure 1, today's G.17 statistical release (Industrial Production and Capacity Utilization) resulted from the merger of two previous releases in 1990, G.12.3 (Industrial Production) and G.3 (Capacity Utilization, Manufacturing, Mining, Utilities and Industrial Materials). Moreover, the G.12.3 release itself had resulted from the merger of G.12.2 (National Summary of Business Conditions) and G.12.3 (Business Indexes) in 1973. Furthermore, before 1976, the data in the G.3 release were published under the number E.5 and with a slightly different title.³ Such information about the G.17 release--and many other releases--that is presented in FEDS Paper 2016-016 provides useful guidance for the researcher or librarian interested in finding the official releases containing both the published data and accompanying text. Of course, not all statistical releases are as hard to trace. For example, from 1946 to the present, the H.4.1 release has kept the same release number and seen only small changes to its title.

Figure 1. G.17 Statistical Release

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The work presented in the FEDS paper also reveals an interesting pattern in the Board's publications over time. The solid line in figure 2 displays the volume of numbered statistical releases published by the Board of Governors since its creation. From 1914 to the 1960s, the Board gradually added new statistical releases to its portfolio, and the general tendency seems to have been for the Board to increase its statistical reporting services. However, from the 1960s to the present, the volume of statistical releases has gradually decreased. While part of this decline reflects the discontinuance of several statistical releases, which resulted in data no longer being made available to the public, there are other reasons for the observed decline. First, in this period, the Board transferred some of its statistical reporting responsibilities to Federal Reserve Banks and other government agencies. For example, between 1964 and 1966, the preparation of weekly, monthly, and annual statistical data on department store sales (C.7.3, G.7.2, G.7.3, and H.8b) was transferred to the Census Bureau.⁴ Second, the Board discontinued statistical releases that included data already being provided by another agency. For example, in June 1978, the Board explained that it was no longer publishing the G.8 release (Index Numbers of Wholesale Prices) because most of the data were being provided and published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Department of Agriculture.⁵ Third, the Board merged many existing statistical releases into single publications, similar to the G.17 example given above. We looked at a few of these mergers, and it seems that the resulting publications incorporated most of the data that were previously included in the merged releases.⁶ As shown by the dashed line in figure 2, if we adjust the volume of numbered statistical releases to account for these three situations, the reduction in the amount of data made available to the public by the Board of Governors, though still present, was somewhat smaller.⁷

Figure 2. Numbered Statistical Releases, 1914-2015

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To conclude, in this note we have used the list of statistical publications presented in FEDS Paper 2016-016 to highlight some aspects of the history of the Federal Reserve Board's statistical releases. We direct interested readers to the paper, especially those looking to track down the Board's statistical publications through history.

Please cite this note as:
Rua, Gisela, and Sian L. Seldin (2016). "History of the Federal Reserve Board Statistical Releases," FEDS Notes. Washington: Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, March X, 2016, http://dx.doi.org/10.17016/2380-7172.1721.