FRB/US Project

FRB/US is a large-scale estimated general equilibrium model of the U.S. economy that was developed at the Federal Reserve Board, where it has been in use since 1996 for forecasting, analysis of policy options, and research projects. The design of FRB/US has in common with the Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (DSGE) approach the view that the actions of many households and firms are based on optimizing behavior in which expectations of future economic conditions play an important role. Compared with DSGE models, however, FRB/US applies optimization theory more flexibly, which permits its equations to better capture patterns in historical data and facilitates modeling the economy in greater detail. For example, FRB/US contains all major components of the product and income sides of the U.S. national accounts. Since its original development, the model has continuously undergone changes to reflect the evolving structure of the economy, including conceptual revisions to sectoral definitions of the national accounts.

A distinctive feature of FRB/US is its ability to switch between alternative assumptions about how economic agents form expectations. Under the VAR-based option, expectations are derived from the average historical dynamics of the economy as manifested in the predictions of estimated VAR models. Under model-consistent (MC), agents are assumed to form accurate expectations of future outcomes as generated by simulations of FRB/US itself.

This web page and the pages accessible through the links in the upper left box enable the public to download FRB/US equations, documentation, data, simulation programs, and specialized model solution code. As of April 2022, the FRB/US simulations can be run using the freely available Python language in addition to the commercial EViews software. The new Python implementation makes use of model solution software written at the Board. Separate download packages are available for the Python and EViews implementations of FRB/US via the links in the box at the upper left. The simulation capabilities of the two implementations are broadly similar and include the ability to solve FRB/US with MC expectations.

A linear version of FRB/US, known as LINVER, has been frequently used in research applications and papers, owing to the vast reduction in computational costs that linearity confers when running experiments under the assumption that expectations are MC, especially ones requiring large numbers of simulations. As of August 2022, a package of material devoted to LINVER is available for download.

Information about FRB/US and LINVER is available via the links to the papers shown in the box at the upper right. Additional documentation is accessible using the link in the box at the upper left to the Documents and Research Papers page and in the documentation subdirectory of the main FRB/US EViews package.

Model disclaimer

 

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Last Update: August 16, 2022