Datasets for finance & economics research
Public, no-cost datasets usable for serious finance and economics research. Each page gives a working access recipe (including no-API-key fallbacks where they exist) and the gotchas that bite automated pipelines — distilled from what the ZeroPaper pipeline actually runs in production.
Free & verified
Section titled “Free & verified”Genuinely no-cost. Every page carries a Verified date — when its access recipe was last actually run against the live source, not just transcribed from docs.
| Dataset | What it is | Page |
|---|---|---|
| FRED | Macro & financial time series (800k+) | FRED |
| SEC EDGAR | US filings, XBRL financials, insider/13F | SEC EDGAR |
| Ken French | Fama-French factors & test portfolios | Ken French |
| Open Source Asset Pricing | 212 anomaly signals + portfolios | OSAP |
| Flexible data-mining | ~30K data-mined long-short strategies | Flex-mining |
| DOL Form 5500 | ERISA pension/welfare plan filings | Form 5500 |
Licensed — academic access
Section titled “Licensed — academic access”Not free, kept deliberately separate from the verified-free set. WRDS / CRSP / Compustat / IBES / OptionMetrics are subscription-gated, but most universities license WRDS for affiliated researchers. See WRDS / CRSP / Compustat for the academic-access path and exactly which free sources above substitute for which paid ones.