Barro-Ursua macroeconomic database

Free academic data, not exercised here

The Barro-Ursua database is a free academic download (no account, no key), but the canonical host (Robert Barro’s university page) returned automated requests with a block from this session, so the end-to-end download was not run here. The page therefore carries no provenance badge: it documents the dataset and the access path, but the pull is unverified under the institute’s Verified discipline. Anyone with a browser can download the file directly.

The Barro-Ursua macroeconomic database (Robert J. Barro and Jose F. Ursua) is a long-run, cross-country panel of annual real per-capita GDP and personal consumer expenditure, built to study rare macroeconomic disasters: large cumulative contractions in output or consumption. For some economies the series reach back into the nineteenth century. It is used in, for example, Krishnamurthy & Muir for long historical real per-capita GDP series for advanced economies.

• Cost: free, academic release (no key, no account).
• Authors / source: Robert J. Barro and Jose F. Ursua; hosted on the authors’ academic pages and referenced by the NBER.
• Coverage: roughly 40 economies, annual; GDP for more countries than consumption; history extends to the 1800s for several countries, ending at the published update vintage.

Access

• Author download. The dataset is published as a spreadsheet workbook on Robert Barro’s academic page (consumption and GDP series, plus the disaster-dating worksheets). It is a direct file download with no key or account.
• Not exercised here. Automated requests from this session were blocked by the host, so confirm the current download URL in a browser. The dataset is a static academic release, so a cached copy is a reasonable fallback.

Gotchas (the ones that bite pipelines)

These are the failure modes to expect; the download itself was not run here.

• Long series are spliced from heterogeneous national sources. Pre-WWII observations stitch together different historical sources by country, so data quality and definitions vary across eras; treat the deep history as more uncertain than the post-war sample.
• Consumption and GDP coverage differ. More countries have a GDP series than a consumption series, and start dates vary by country, so a balanced panel is much shorter than the full file. Decide on the series and the balanced window deliberately.
• The disaster definition is a construct, not a field. “Disasters” are derived by applying a cumulative-contraction threshold (the authors use a fractional peak-to-trough decline) to the series; the raw data does not label them. Reproduce the threshold to match the papers.
• It is a periodic academic release, not a maintained feed. The data ends at the publication update vintage and is not refreshed in real time; do not expect recent years. Pin the vintage you used.
• Currency basis and population denominators vary. Real-terms basis and the per-capita denominator are country-specific; check the definitions before pooling across countries.

Citation

Cite the Barro-Ursua macroeconomic database (Barro and Ursua), stating the series used (real per-capita GDP or consumption), the country sample and window, the release vintage, and the disaster threshold applied. The companion references are Barro and Ursua, “Macroeconomic Crises since 1870” (2008) and related work.