Since its founding in 1920, one of the National Bureau of Economic Research's (NBER's) most important goals has been the accurate measurement of the aggregate economy. Especially during its early years, the NBER devoted considerable resources to the collection of data, culling this information from both government and private sources. These data collection efforts proved extremely valuable to future researchers in both academia and government. For example, they led directly to the development of the index of leading economic indicators. At the time the data were collected, there was no method available for storing them electronically, so the NBER researchers copied them by hand from the original sources onto data sheets. In 1978, the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) in Ann Arbor, Michigan, with funding from the NSF, transferred the data from the NBER's handwritten sheets to magnetic tape. This tape is available to the public from the ICPSR. A number of researchers have used the ICPSR tape. The contribution of this project comes from converting the ICPSR tape to floppy disks and verifying the accuracy of the data using the NBER's original handwritten sheets. Access to the data will be greatly improved by making it available on floppy disks in a format compatible with common time series packages for the PC. At present the use of data on the ICPSR tape requires the cumbersome task of reading the tape on a mainframe and then downloading the data to a PC. Since there are over 7,500 series on the tape, it is time consuming to download them all. Additionally, the structure of the tape makes it difficult toe extract a single series or a small group of series. Also the process of transferring the data from the NBER's handwritten sheets to the ICPSR tape introduced a number of mistakes into the data set, and this project will correct these mistakes.
