• What is Compustat?
  COMPUSTAT provides more than 300 annual and 100 quarterly Income Statement, Balance Sheet, Statement of Cash Flows, and supplemental data items, on approximately 10,000 actively traded companies and 8,000 inactive companies. It is a product of Standard & Poor's which is a division of McGraw-Hill, Inc. The industrial annual formats offer both historical and restated data. The industrial quarterly formats offer restated data as reported by the company. For most companies, annual information is available for a maximum of 20 years and quarterly information is available for a maximum of 48 quarters.
• Research Insight is Compustat's PC application. It provides a Windows interface for accessing the Compustat data. Research Insight is available on the W. P. Carey School of Business network. Note- The variables may not be computed identically between the two. See the Research Insight page for more information. 
• The Compustat files are available on the WRDS Unix servers and the School of Business network as SAS data sets. To access the WRDS Unix servers, use SSH to connect to wrds.wharton.upenn.edu . On the School of Business network, they are located at K:\sas data .

Industrial	Contains the largest companies on the New York and American Stock exchanges, including all companies comprising the S&P Industrial Index, and utility subsidiaries that were once S&P 500 constituents.
Full Coverage	Contains NASDAQ companies, companies listed on regional exchanges, publicly held companies trading common stock, and wholly owned subsidiaries trading preferred stock or debt.
Research	Contains companies that have deleted from the Primary, Supplementary, Tertiary, Over-the-Counter, and Full-Coverage files due to bankruptcy, acquisition or merger, leveraged buyout, or because they became private companies.
Business Information / Industry Segment	The Business Information File is a companion to the industrial Annual files.
Canadian	Contains more than 700 major Canadian industrial companies that report in Canadian currency. Canadian companies are available in Annual, Quarterly, and Prices, Dividends, and Earnings (PDE). COMPUSTAT as an add-on. You have the choice of receiving Canadian Annual and Canadian Quarterly in the U.S. dollars or Canadian dollars.
Core Earnings	Contains S&P core corporate earnings
Index Fundamentals	Contains financial data, per share data, and ratios for the S&P Indexes
Prices, Dividends, and Earnings	Contains market information on all Compustat industrial companies and more than 600 industry indexes and composites.
Bank	Contains 650 banking companies with up to 20 years and 48 qtrs of data.

Compustat data is available through the WRDS web interface, on the WRDS Unix servers, and on the School of Business network.  The current data files were created by Compustat on August  2004. Click on each of the files below to see a listing of the data items available in that dataset. Click on Data Codes for a list of codes used in the SAS datasets to represent missing, combined, insignificant, semi-annual, and annual figures.

Local W. P. Carey School of Business directory: K:\SAS Data\

WRDS Unix server working directory: /wrds/compustat/sasdata/  

NOTE: The current Compustat SAS dataset names are based on the WRDS naming convention. This differs from the default names given to the raw datafiles by Compustat. For a table comparing the Compustat file names to the WRDS SAS file names, click here.