Compustat

Short Description of Compustat North America

Compustat North America is a database of U.S. and Canadian fundamental and market information on active and inactive publicly held companies. It provides more than 300 annual and 100 quarterly Income Statement, Balance Sheet, Statement of Cash Flows, and supplemental data items on more than 24,000 publicly held companies.  If you are interested in doing research on finances of companies, this is the place to do it.

For instance, you might have ideas related to Total Earnings, Earnings per share, Price per share, Sales, Expenses, R&D expenses, COGS, net income, net income from continuing operations, market to book ratio, market value of equity, book value of equity, total debt, dividends per share, operating cash flow, etc.

Compustat North America files are available in both annual and quarterly formats. The industrial annual formats offer both historical and restated data. The industrial quarterly formats offer restated data as reported by the company. The restated data allows analysts to compare current and prior years’ results on a comparable basis and determine financial trends and growth rates. For most companies, annual history is available back to 1950 and quarterly history back to 1962 with monthly market history back to 1962.

Compustat North America files contain information on aggregates, industry segments, banks, market prices, dividends, earnings, and ratios among other things. For more detailed information on the Compustat files, consult the Compustat User’s Guide posted here.

This website also gives you lots of stock market data as well (CRSP).

There are many resources available on the Compustat (WRDS) website.  To access compustat, you must sign on the our class’s Compustat account with the username qm22217 at

https://wrds-web.wharton.upenn.edu/wrds   (pw — QM222f17)

Once you are in, click Classroom on the top menu and you can get an Introduction to WRDS in three lessons.

Also, you might want to go to  https://wrds-web.wharton.upenn.edu/wrds/support/using_data.cfm   which allows you to find a variety of useful tools and lists.

The data set must be downloaded.  It is available in Stata or XML Excel format (among others).

Click here for an old Compustat Users Guide.  It is a bit old, but can tell you about all of the items available on this site.

Click here for a short page-view of how to download from Compustat.

To download the data, follow the instructions on the website. You will need to ask for specific companies, using their tickers, although you can ask for many companies at once. To help you, we have separately attached an Excel file with the S&P500 tickers in case you want to use these.

You might also be interested in the COMPUSTAT/ ExecuComp which has executive compensation data.

A Pardee Library librarian can help you if you are having trouble with Compustat.  They have a compustat terminal there as well, but it is not easy to download data from that termina.