Data
Free, reliable, public data sources for your problem sets, projects, and any time you want to check whether a number you read somewhere is actually true. All links below are free for ACC students — several require only your ACC email to activate.
Your free WSJ subscription.
ACC pays for every student's full Wall Street Journal membership. Register once with your ACC email and you're in through graduation.
wsj.com/AustinCC
Register with your ACCmail address to unlock full WSJ.com, the WSJ apps, podcasts, and curated newsletters. Students keep access through graduation; faculty and staff refresh once a year.
WSJ Membership Guide
ACC's official walk-through if the registration link gives you trouble. Also answers what's included, how far back the archives go, and how to use WSJ on mobile.
The big three.
These are the sources you'll use most in this class. Bookmark all three.
FRED — Federal Reserve Economic Data
Over 800,000 economic time series from 100+ sources. GDP, unemployment, inflation, interest rates, exchange rates. Free, no login required, every series downloadable as CSV or Excel. This is the gold standard for U.S. and international macroeconomic data.
WSJ Markets Data Center
Current and historical data on U.S. and international stocks, mutual funds, bonds, commodities, and currencies. Historical tables go back to 2007. Look for the "Historical Prices" link on any ticker page to download CSVs. Uses your ACC WSJ login.
CIA World Factbook
Still alive, just moved. Country-by-country profiles — population, GDP, labor force, trade, geography, government — all in one place. Updated weekly. Free, no paywall, no account. The single best source for quick international comparisons.
When the big three don't have it.
Bureau of Labor Statistics
Official source for U.S. employment, wages, CPI (inflation), and productivity data. FRED re-publishes most of this, but BLS is where it originates — and the BLS site has better narrative explanations of what each series actually measures.
U.S. Census Bureau
Population, housing, business, and economic data at the national, state, county, and zip-code level. American Community Survey is the tool you'll want most often.
Bureau of Economic Analysis
Official source for GDP, personal income, trade balances, and industry-level economic accounts. If you need to cite GDP in a paper, cite BEA.
World Bank Open Data
Free, open access to global development data. Great for cross-country comparisons, poverty and inequality measures, and long historical series for nearly every country on earth.
IMF Data
International financial statistics, balance of payments, government finance, and the World Economic Outlook database. Pairs well with World Bank data when you need both macro and financial angles.
OECD Data
High-quality, comparable data across 38 member countries — heavy on economic indicators, education, health, and environment. Good source when you want a peer-country comparison.
Gapminder
Clean, teaching-friendly datasets on income, health, population, and education across countries and decades. Built by Hans Rosling's foundation; everything is free and well-documented.
Yahoo Finance
Quick, free historical stock and ETF price downloads. Click any ticker → Historical Data → Download. Good when you just need clean price series fast and don't want to dig through WSJ.
Kaggle Datasets
Thousands of user-contributed datasets on everything from retail sales to sports to marketing. Quality varies — check the source before you trust it — but great for open-ended class projects when you want something unusual.
A note on citing data
Whenever you use data from any source on this page, cite it. For most of these, the citation is simple: source name, series name, date accessed, and URL. Example: "U.S. unemployment rate, FRED series UNRATE, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, accessed April 2026, https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UNRATE."
If you're ever not sure whether you're allowed to use a dataset — or how to cite it — just ask me.