Currently, this gopher contains several things of interest: the Penn World Tables (versions 5, 5.5, and 5.6), the Survey of Consumer Finance (which will fit on three floppies), trade and immigration data from Abowd and Freeman, and a list of NBER working papers and reprints (which must first be uudecoded then uncompressed; the ultimate size is some 2.5 megabytes). The latter is also available at BibEc. Note that not all data is available with both the ftp and gopher methods; in particular, of the data, only the Penn World Tables are available on the gopher site.
Details on the Penn World Tables can be found in Summers, R. and A. Heston, 1991. "The Penn World Table (Mark 5): An Expanded Set of International Comparisons, 1950-1988.", Quarterly Journal of Economics, pp. 327-68.
For the Penn World tables, an extensive set of macros for the Excel spreadsheet program can be found in pub/pwt55.spreadsheet. For more information on this set of macros, contact the author, Sailesh Tanna <skt@le.ac.uk>.
Bob Parks has kindly made the Penn World Tables available, in raw, Excel, and MicroTSP files, at the Washington University at St. Louis Economics Department gopher (described elsewhere in this guide). Be sure to read his documentation.
The EPAS Computing Facility at the University of Toronto also makes this data available to those who have a "forms" capable web browser. Its interface is easy to use, and one can retrieve individual or multiple series, or one can plot them interactively. This site is further described in its own entry in this guide.
One can only hope that someday NBER working papers will be available here or on another working paper archive.
telnet://gopher@nber.harvard.edu
ftp://nber.harvard.edu/pub/nber
gopher://nber.harvard.edu:70/1/
Bill Goffe <bgoffe@whale.st.usm.edu>