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COMPUSTAT NORTH AMERICA

Contents

Availability

Compustat North America can be accessed both through a web interface and via Unix, programming in SAS or Fortran. To facilitate access, Kellogg has subscribed to Wharton Research Data Services (WRDS). WRDS's servers is the main access environment for Compustat data, offering the most current files.

Compustat can be accessed by Kellogg faculty and doctoral students using their WRDS accounts. MBA students may obtain a temporary account and password to the WRDS's web interface in the context of a course, if the faculty member uses it for instructional purposes and applies for a class account. Otherwise, for automatic login (controlled by IP address) from the first and second floors in the Jacobs Center, as well as the lab workstations in Wieboldt Hall, please point your web browser to wrds.wharton.upenn.edu/connect.

Description

Standard & Poor's Compustat North America provides the annual and quarterly Income Statement, Balance Sheet, Statement of Cash Flows, and supplemental data items on most publicly held companies in the United States and Canada. Financial data items are collected from a wide variety of sources including news wire services, news releases, shareholder reports, direct company contacts, and quarterly and annual documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Compustat files also contain information on aggregates, industry segments, banks, market prices, dividends, and earnings. Depending upon the data set, coverage may extend as far back as 1950 through the most recent year-end. Kellogg’s subscription to Compustat includes the files listed below.

  • Industrial files (ina, inq): Includes data from balance statements, income statements and cash flows for the publicly help companies listed in NYSE and AMEX for the most recent 20 years

  • Full coverage files (fca, fcq): Includes companies listed in NASDAQ, regional exchanges, publicly held companies trading common stock and wholly owned subsidiaries trading preferred stock or debt.

  • Research files (res, req): Contain companies that have been deleted from the Industrial files [Primary, Supplementary, Tertiary] and the Full-Coverage files due to acquisition, merger, bankruptcy, liquidation, reverse acquisition, leveraged buyout, or because they became a private company. The “Current” data file covers the most recent 20 years and is updated annually. There are two additional research data files, one that covers the previous 20 years (currently, 1961-1980, updated annually, called “Backdata”) and one that covers 1950 through 1969 (“Wayback data”). The last one is not updated.

  • Bank files (bna, bnq): Data on about 600-700 banking institutions.

  • Business Information Industry Segment file (bif): Contain up to seven fiscal years for each company. Within each year there are from one to ten records of industry segment data, depending on reports by companies.

  • Business Information Geographic Segment files (geo): Contain up to seven fiscal years for each company. Within each year there are 5 records of geographic segment data.

  • Prices, Dividends and Earnings files (pde), current and research: Contain market information and about 120 industry indexes and composites.

Note: Many users frequently search three of Compustat’s databases to find a specific company (industrial, research and full coverage files). Wharton has combined the three files into one in the SAS version of the data (compann.sas7bdat and compqtr.sas7bdat).

Vendor information

Standard & Poor's Institutional Market Services
7400 S. Alton Court
Englewood, CO 80112
Phone: (303) 721-4551
Fax: (303) 721-5090

Accessing Compustat

Faculty and doctoral students should access the latest Compustat files through Wharton Research Data Services.

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