This contains the alternative FOMC statements proposed by the Federal Reserve Board staff contained in Bluebooks /Tealbooks document (Part II).
Each file begins with a 6 number identifier - this corresponds to the year and month of production of the Bluebook / Tealbook given as YYYYMM. For example, 200501 corresponds to the January 2005 Bluebook. It should be noted that since the colour books are produced in advance of the FOMC meeting, it is sometimes the case that the colour book month-year precedes that of the FOMC meeting.
In most cases, there are 3 alternatives presented; these are labelled A, B and C. In some cases there are fewer and in some cases there are more. Where there are more, and these are associated with different policy actions, the alternatives will be labelled with an additional number after the corresponding letter. For instance, if there are two Alternative A policy actions, the corresponding proposed statements will be labelled A and A2. In the actual Bluebook / Tealbook, these are often reported as A and A' but I have adopted the numbering system for consistency. This is also true in the corresponding policy options data.
In some cases, particularly in the years after the financial crisis, the staff proposed different sets of words but these are all associated with the same policy action. In these instances, I have endeavoured to create the different possible versions of the statement and identified them using the combinations of the letter x or y after the name. So A and Ax would respectively refer to the "main" proposed statement and the slightly different worded version. In some cases, there were lots of alternatives and so there may be statements labelled A, Ax, Axx and even, Ay, Ayy (the switch to y does not indicate anything other than I didn't want to call files Axxxx...). In most cases, researchers will only want to work with one version of the alternative statement - for my own research I will focus on the A version as I have tried to construct that as the most likely (based of FOMC statements actually made and other proposed alternatives), but I leave this decision up to others.
In some cases there were more permutations of the alternatives possible but I tried to limit the number by choosing only combinations that seemed consistent with one another. For instance, if there are two separate sentence choices which each contained text options reflectin a choice between expressing (i) more optimism about the labour market or (ii) being more guarded about the labour market, I would generate 2 alternative statements (A and Ax) using optimistic-optimistic and guarded-guarded as the choices. Of course I could have considered optimistic-guarded or guarded-optimistic but didn't see these are likely choices. Researchers wishing to revisit these decisions can see all the possible choices by reading the Bluebook/Tealbook pdf files on the FOMC website.