@pipeworx/nber-macrohistory

Connect: https://gateway.pipeworx.io/nber-macrohistory/mcp · Install: one-click buttons

No MCP client? Skip the connection: POST https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/search_packs {"query":"..."} to find a tool below, GET /v1/tools/<name> for its schema, POST the same URL with arguments for the data — see For AI agents.

Tools: 2

NBER Macrohistory Database — the National Bureau of Economic Research’s public archive of long-run U.S. (and some international) macroeconomic series, most running from the 1800s through the 1960s, across 16 subject categories (prices, money & banking, production, construction, employment, agriculture, foreign trade, government finance, and more). Look up a specific series by its NBER id (e.g. m13045), or browse the ids in one of the 16 subject folders.

Tools

• nber_macrohistory_series(series_id) — one series by its NBER id (e.g. "m13045" or "a01006"). Returns the title, area covered, units, coverage dates and source notes (parsed from NBER’s own documentation for that series) plus every dated observation. m = monthly, a = annual, q = quarterly. If you only have the bare digits, it tries monthly, then annual, then quarterly, and returns whichever exists.
• nber_macrohistory_list_series(category) — every series id in one of the 16 subject-category folders ("01" through "16"). No titles (the directory listing doesn’t carry them) — call nber_macrohistory_series on an id to see what it is.

Auth

Keyless.

Data sources

• https://www.nber.org/research/data/nber-macrohistory-database — the archive’s landing page (background only, not fetched by this pack).
• https://data.nber.org/databases/macrohistory/rectdata/{folder}/{id}.dat — the series’ raw fixed-width data file.
• https://data.nber.org/databases/macrohistory/rectdata/{folder}/docs/{id}.txt — the series’ documentation header (title, area, units, coverage, source, notes).
• https://data.nber.org/databases/macrohistory/rectdata/{folder}/ — a category’s directory listing, scraped for nber_macrohistory_list_series.

This is a live per-request proxy: every call fetches directly from data.nber.org, nothing is bulk-downloaded or stored by this pack.

Series id → folder. Strip the leading letter (m/a/q); the folder is the first two digits of what remains — "m13045" → folder "13", "a01005a" → folder "01". Verified across categories 01, 07, 08, 11, 13, 15, 16 (2026-09-23). There is no folder 00 or above 16.

data.nber.org 403s any User-Agent containing the literal substring "http", or the substring "bot". Its block page says “Prevent Bots from data downloads.” Measured 2026-09-23: "foo/1.0 (+https://x)" → 403, "somebot/1.0" → 403 (on “bot” alone), "foo/1.0 (pipeworx.io)" → 200. Every other pack in this catalog uses a "(+https://pipeworx.io)" User-Agent convention — this one deliberately does not, and cannot, or every request 403s. If you copy this pack’s fetch pattern elsewhere against an nber.org/data.nber.org host, keep that in mind.

The per-series .dat file has no missing-data sentinel constant across series — this pack treats any value with abs(value) < 1e-30 as missing, based on the doc header’s stated MD=1E-37 convention seen on the series checked so far. If a series’ doc header states a different missing-data code, this pack does not read that field — it’s a fixed heuristic, not parsed per series.

The .dat files are NOT one row per line uniformly — annual (a-prefix) rows are YEAR VALUE, monthly/quarterly (m/q-prefix) rows are YEAR PERIOD VALUE. This pack tells them apart by counting whitespace-split tokens per line (2 vs 3+), not by trusting the id’s prefix letter, since a few ids in the wild (e.g. m13001a) carry a monthly prefix with an annual-shaped suffix.

The doc .txt header has no field delimiter for its title — the human-readable title sits directly above a "----" dashed underline, above which are terse field codes (VAR/REF/EXP lines) that look like more title text but aren’t. This pack anchors on the dashed line and reads backward to the nearest blank line or field-code line, rather than trying to match the title text by shape.

Tools

• nber_macrohistory_series — One NBER Macrohistory series by its NBER id (e.g. “m13045”, “a01006”, “q04002”) — the National Bureau of Economic Research’s long-run archive of historical U.S. macroeconomic series (prices, money & b
• nber_macrohistory_list_series — List every NBER Macrohistory series id in one of the archive’s 16 subject categories (2-digit folder “01” through “16”) — use this to discover what series exist in a category before fetching one with