About this corpus

17,452 documents · 96.0M words · 15 channels · 1897–2026

A comprehensive corpus of Federal Reserve communication, assembled for monetary-policy-transmission research. Sources include federalreserve.gov, FRASER (St. Louis Fed digital archive), and the public-affairs sites of all twelve regional Reserve Banks. Documents were retrieved with permission and rate-limit compliance, OCR'd where only scanned PDFs were available, and indexed with normalized speaker names and roles.

License

Data: CC0. Federal Reserve material is already public domain (works of the U.S. federal government, 17 U.S.C. § 105); CC0 makes that explicit.

Code: MIT. Scrapers and site source on GitHub.

Cite this corpus

Harmon, D. (2026). When the Fed Speaks: A Federal Reserve Communications Database.
Layer 1 of the Monetary Policy Transmission Database.
https://whenthefedspeaks.com

More

• Full data downloads, methodology notes, and the Zenodo DOI are coming in a future release.
• Source code: GitHub repository (link placeholder; update when public).
• This site is the work of Derek Harmon, building on the 2019 ASQ paper When the Fed Speaks.