General Information

• 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 .

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.