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Research Resources

Direct Subscriptions (Access information with the Finance department)

  • SDC Platinum - SDC Platinum from Thomson Reuters is the industry standard for information on new equity and debt issues, M&A, syndicated loans, private equity, project finance, poison pills, and VentureXpert.
  • ISS Governance - ISS provides Corporate Takeover Defenses and Director data; Voting Analytics; and Incentive Lab database that covers incentives in executive compensation.

Subscription through VT Libraries (Site licenses)

  • Mergent Online
  • S&P Industry Surveys
  • ValueLine Research

Through Wharton Research Data Services

WRDS provides instant access to important databases in the fields of finance, accounting, banking, economics, management, marketing and public policy. The Departments of Accounting and Finance acknowledge the financial support of the University Libraries in subscribing to Wharton Research Data Services.

Databases in WRDS

  • Audit Analytics - Audit Analytics provides detailed research on over 150,000 active audits and more than 10,000 accounting firms. Audit Analytics data includes detailed categorizations of issues and is considered by many professionals to be the best primary data source for tracking and analysis of public company disclosures related to the audit, compliance, governance, corporate actions and federal litigation.
  • COMPUSTAT - COMPUSTAT (from Standard & Poor's) 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. The COMPUSTAT databases on WRDS include Industrial, Full Coverage, Research; Prices, Dividends & Earnings; Segments; Bank; Canadian; Global Vantage; and EXECUCOMP. The Departments of Accounting and Finance acknowledge the financial support of the University Libraries in subscribing to COMPUSTAT.
  • COMPUSTAT Execucomp - Annual Compensation, Company Financial and Director Compensation for 2005 and prior, Deferred Compensation, Director Compensation, Long Term Incentive Awards - 1992 Format, Outstanding Equity Awards, Pension Benefits, Plan Based Awards, Stock Option Grants - 1992 Format
  • CRSP Stock - The CRSP's US Stock Database provides a unique research source characterized by its unmatched breadth, depth, and completeness. It includes CRSP's unique permanent identifiers allowing for clean and accurate backtesting, time-series and event studies, measurement of performance, accurate benchmarking, and securities analysis.
  • CRSP Indices - CRSP's unique historical Indices Databases serve as benchmarks for the investment community, and as a foundation for academic research. Created according to clear, unbiased and systematic processes, these indexes undergo rigorous procedures to promote data accuracy, timeliness and consistency. Each CRSP index is offered as a series that contains decile subsets for market analysis.
  • CRSP Mutual Funds - The CRSP Survivor-Bias-Free US Mutual Fund Database serves as a foundation for research in and benchmarking for this asset class. Central to this work is the use of survivor-bias-free data to insure the accuracy of performance benchmarks, and the validity of analyses. Created according to clear, unbiased and systematic processes, this database undergoes rigorous procedures employed to promote data accuracy, timeliness and consistency.
  • IBES - I/B/E/S International Inc. created their Academic Research Program over 30 years ago to provide both summary and individual analyst forecasts of company earnings, cash flows, and other important financial items, as well as buy-sell-hold recommendations. In 2000, I/B/E/S was integrated with Thomson Reuters / First Call, and in 2012 First Call was discontinued.
  • ISS - RiskMetrics (through ISS Governance Services) is a leader in corporate governance data. IRRC was initially the data provider for WRDS. IRRC, however, was acquired by ISS in 2005. This acquisition did not initially affect the data provided through WRDS, but that changed in 2007 when RiskMetrics changed the methodology to collect data to follow ISS specifications. Also, the new methodology does not collect all the variables needed to create the Governance Index (GIndex). As a consequence, beginning with data for 2007, WRDS keeps the old IRRC-methodology data (Legacy version) separated from the GCQ type of data.
  • ISSM - The Institute for the Study of Security Markets (ISSM) database contains tick-by-tick data covering the NYSE and AMEX between 1983 and 1992, and NASDAQ between 1987 and 1992. Each year of data is divided into two files, one for trades and one for quotes.
  • KLD - MSCI. To meet the needs of social investors, KLD provides research, benchmarks, compliance, and consulting services analogous to those provided by financial research service firms. KLD has been providing research products and services to the financial services market since 1988. Featuring the largest corporate social research staff in the world, KLD produces high-quality consistent research that institutions have come to rely on.
  • MFLinks - The MFLINKS tables provide a reliable means to link CRSP Mutual Fund (MFDB) data that covers mutual fund performance, expenses, and related information to equity holdings data in the Thomson Reuters Mutual Fund Ownership data (formerly known as the CDA S12 data). Using MFLINKS allows a researcher to gather detail on holdings either for particular funds or fund families and groups of funds at specific points in time.
  • Markit - Markit's pricing and reference data use contributions from global institutions. Markit's growing set of asset classes is used throughout the industry for mark-to-market, research reference, risk control and forecasting activities.
  • PHLX - The Philadelphia Stock Exchange founded in 1790 is the oldest organized stock exchange in the nation. As one of North America's primary marketplaces for the trading of stocks, equity options, index options and currency options, the PHLX continues to be a market leader in the development and introduction of innovative new products and services.
  • RepRisk - RepRisk is a leading business intelligence provider, specializing in environmental, social, and governance (ESG) risk analytics and metrics.
  • TAQ - Contains intraday transactions data (trades and quotes) for all securities listed on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), American Stock Exchange (AMEX), as well as Nasdaq National Market System (NMS) and SmallCap issues.
  • Thomson Reuters Mutual Funds - Thomson-Reuters Mutual Fund Holdings database provides security holding information for all registered mutual funds that report their holdings with the SEC, plus 3,000 global funds. Reported securities include all NYSE/AMEX/NASDAQ, Toronto, and Montreal common stocks. This database is formerly known as CDA/Spectrum, and is often referred to as Spectrum 1 2 for ownership information by registered Investment Companies or Domestic Mutual Funds.
  • Thomson Reuters 13f Holdings - Thomson-Reuters Institutional Holdings (13F) Database provides Institutional Common Stock Holdings and Transactions, as reported on Form 13F filed with the SEC. This database is formerly known as CDA/Spectrum 3 4 database, and contains ownership information by institutional managers with $100 million or more in Assets Under Management (Section 13(f) Securities).
  • Thomas Reuters Insiders Data - The Insider Filing Data Feed (IFDF) is designed to capture all U.S. insider activity as reported on Forms 3, 4, 5 and 144 in line-by-line detail. In addition, a unique cleansing process is used by Thomson Reuters that adds value by making systematic interpretations on the accuracy of as-reported data and inserts "cleansed" fields for comparison. A cleanse code is also included to denote the overall level of confidence in each record. Additionally, the Insider Filing Data Feed includes performance calculations revealing which insiders' prior trades have been most predictive of subsequent stock returns.

Public Databases

  • Bank Regulatory - The Bank Regulatory Database contains five databases for regulated depository financial institutions. These databases provide accounting data for bank holding companies, commercial banks, savings banks, and savings and loans institutions. The source of the data comes from the required regulatory forms filed for supervising purposes. Please see the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago website for more information.
  • Blockholders - This dataset contains standardized data for blockholders of 1,913 companies. The data was cleaned from biases and mistakes usually observed in the standard source for this particular type of data. Blockholders' data is reported by firm for the period 1996-2001. The data cleaning procedure is explained in detail by Jennifer Dlugosz, Rudiger Fahlenbrach, Paul A. Gompers, and Andrew Metrick in their study "Large Blocks of Stocks: Prevalance, Size, and Measurement".
  • Fama French - The Fama-French Portfolios are constructed from the intersections of two portfolios formed on size, as measured by market equity (ME), and three portfolios using the ratio of book equity to market equity (BE/ME) as a proxy for value. Returns from these portfolios are used to construct the Fama-French Factors. Eugene Fama and Kenneth French showed that their factors capture a statistically significant fraction of the variation in stock returns (see Common Risk Factors in the Returns on Stocks and Bonds, Journal of Financial Economics 33, 1993). The Fama-French data source is Kenneth French's web site at Dartmouth.
  • Federal Reserve Bank Reports - The Federal Reserve Bank Reports in WRDS contain three databases collected from Federal Reserve Banks: two of them come from Reports published from the Federal Reserve Board; the other one comes from the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia.
  • Foreign Exchange Rates - (Federal Reserve Board's H.10 Report) - The WRDS FX database is based upon the Federal Reserve Board's H.10 release and contains Foreign Exchange rates for over 30 world currencies and trade-weighted indices. WRDS carries all of these FX rates in currency units per U.S. dollar (e.g. yen/$ and a few are also available in inverted form (e.g. $/pound).
  • Penn World Tables - The Penn World Tables provides national income accounts-type of variables converted to international prices. The homogenization of national accounts to a common numeraire allows valid comparisons of income among countries. Data comes from Alan Heston, Robert Summers and Bettina Aten, Penn World Table Version 6.1, Center for International Comparisons at the University of Pennsylvania, October 2002 (CICUP).