We introduce KRED (Korea Research Economic Database), a new FRED MD style macroeconomic dataset for South Korea. KRED is constructed by aggregating 88 key monthly time series from multiple official sources (e.g., Bank of Korea ECOS, Statistics Korea KOSIS) into a unified, publicly available database. The dataset is aligned with the FRED MD format, enabling standardized transformations and direct comparability; an Appendix maps each Korean series to its FRED MD counterpart. Using a balanced panel of 80 series from 2009 to 2024, we extract four principal components via PCA that explain approximately 40% of the total variance. These four factors have intuitive economic interpretations, capturing monetary conditions, labor market activity, real output, and housing demand, analogous to diffusion indexes summarizing broad economic movements. Notably, the factor based diffusion indexes derived from KRED clearly trace major macroeconomic fluctuations over the sample period such as the 2020 COVID 19 recession. Our results demonstrate that KRED's factor structure can effectively condense complex economic information into a few informative indexes, yielding new insights into South Korea's business cycles and co movements.

翻译：本文介绍KRED（韩国研究经济数据库），这是一个采用FRED MD风格构建的韩国宏观经济新数据集。KRED通过整合来自多个官方数据源（如韩国银行ECOS系统、韩国统计厅KOSIS系统）的88个关键月度时间序列，构建成统一且公开可用的数据库。该数据集严格遵循FRED MD格式，支持标准化数据转换与直接可比性；附录提供了各韩国序列与FRED MD对应指标的映射表。基于2009年至2024年间80个序列的平衡面板数据，我们通过主成分分析提取出四个主成分，可解释约40%的总方差。这四个因子具有直观的经济学解释，分别对应货币条件、劳动力市场活跃度、实际产出与住房需求，其功能类似于概括广泛经济动向的扩散指数。值得注意的是，基于KRED构建的因子扩散指数清晰刻画了样本期内重大宏观经济波动，如2020年COVID-19经济衰退。研究结果表明，KRED的因子结构能够将复杂经济信息有效浓缩为若干具有信息量的指数，为理解韩国经济周期与协同波动提供了新的视角。