Download and Merge FRED Series — getFRED • tidyusmacro

A flexible wrapper that downloads one or more data series from the St. Louis Fed (FRED) API, optionally computes one-period percentage changes, and merges them into a tidy tibble keyed by date.

Usage

getFRED(..., keep_all = TRUE, rename_variables = NULL, lagged = NULL)

Arguments

...

One or more FRED series IDs. Each element may be either

Unnamed character string: The raw FRED ticker; column keeps the lowercase ticker name, e.g.\ "UNRATE".
Named character string: The value is the FRED ticker and the name becomes the column label, e.g.\ payroll = "PAYEMS".

You may also pass a single character vector (named or unnamed) for compatibility with older code.

keep_all

Logical. TRUE (default) performs a full join that keeps all dates across series; FALSE performs an inner join.

rename_variables

Optional character vector of new column names (one per series), retained for backward compatibility. Supply either this argument or names in ..., not both.

lagged

Logical scalar or logical vector. If TRUE (or the corresponding element is TRUE), the series is replaced by its one-period percentage change \((x_t / x_{t-1}) - 1\). Recycled to match the number of series if length 1.

Value

A tibble with a date column and one column per requested series.

Details

You may supply the series in two ways:

Natural “...” style: getFRED(unrate = "UNRATE", payroll = "PAYEMS"). Named arguments give friendly column names; unnamed arguments keep the (lower-case) ticker as the column name.
Legacy style: pass a single (optionally named) character vector—e.g.\ c(unrate = "UNRATE", payroll = "PAYEMS")—and/or use the rename_variables= argument. This remains supported for backward compatibility.

If you provide names in ... and a non-NULL rename_variables vector, the function stops and prompts you to choose a single naming method.

Examples

if (FALSE) { # \dontrun{
# New interface
getFRED(unrate = "UNRATE", payroll = "PAYEMS")

# Multiple unnamed series (columns become 'unrate' and 'payems')
getFRED("UNRATE", "PAYEMS")

} # }