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Vol. 2, No. 1 Fall 2004
Patty MacDonald, Head of Reference
Services
This fall the library acquired
a subscription to Wharton Research Data Services (WRDS), an innovative
Web-based gateway to business data. WRDS gives faculty and students
the ability to easily retrieve information from a wide variety
of financial, economic, and marketing data sources. Developed
in 1993 to support faculty research at the Wharton School of the
University of Pennsylvania, the service is now used by many of
the most highly-rated business schools, including Harvard, Duke
and the London School of Business. Although WRDS provides access
to a variety of databases, it is best known for its holdings of
historical financial data from CRSP and COMPUSTAT.
According to their user's guide, "COMPUSTAT North America is a database of financial, statistical and
market information covering publicly traded companies in the U.S. and Canada. It provides more than 340
annual and 120 quarterly Income Statement, Flow of Funds and supplemental data items on more than 10,000
active and 9,700 inactive companies. With COMPUSTAT you can customize the data output for virtually
any financial application." In addition, the COMPUSTAT Global & EMDB databases provide information on
international companies in over 80 countries, as well as information and statistics on stock markets
in developing countries. WRDS is unique among our business databases in its ability to custom-query
the COMPUSTAT database and thus allow users to build custom data tables that they can output and save in
a variety of formats.
While COMPUSTAT provides company information, the CRSP databases contain security price data. CRSP is
a research center at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, and it maintains historical
data from December 1925 to the present. The library plans to add access to CRSP in January 2005.
If you would like more information or training using the WRDS database, please contact the Reference
Desk at 410-617-6802 or askemail@loyola.edu.
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