A real-time data set for marcoeconomists: does the data vintage matter?

This paper presents a real-time data set that can be used by economists for testing the robustness of published econometric results, for analyzing policy, and for forecasting. The data set consists of vintages, or snapshots, of the major macroeconomic data available at quarterly intervals in real time. The paper illustrates why such data may matter, explains the construction of the data set, examines the properties of several of the variables in the data set across vintages, and examines key empirical papers in macroeconomics, investigating their robustness to different vintages.