Matching Form 5500 Filings with Compustat and CRSP

The Form 5500 filings are a relatively underutilized source of information about employee benefit plans. While these filings constitute a rich source of information on certain aspects of employer-provided employee benefit plans, their usefulness for many issues is limited by a lack of general firm-level information. The value of this data can be enhanced, however, by matching it to other publicly available firm-level data sources. In this paper, we discuss the issues involved in matching the Form 5500 data to Compustat, one of the most-widely utilized sources of firm-level data on large corporations. We then provide an approach to matching these two data sources.