March 2007

WRDS IN THE NEWS

WELCOME to the new subscribers who recently joined WRDS:

Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.A.
Florida Atlantic University, Florida, U.S.A.
IESE Business School, Spain
James Madison University, Virginia, U.S.A.
Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology, South Korea
Korea University, Business School, South Korea
Macquarie University, Australia
Seoul National University, South Korea
University of Aarhus, Denmark
University of Central Florida, Florida, U.S.A.
University of Edinburgh, U.K.
University of Maastricht, Netherlands
University of North Carolina at Greensboro, North Carolina, U.S.A.
University of Western Australia, Australia
Yonsei University, South Korea

2007 Users Meeting. Our next WRDS Users Meeting will take place in Philadelphia, PA in October 2007. More information to come.

Changes in Compustat Data Feeds and Formats. Standard & Poor's is phasing out the Compustat FTP ASCII data file delivery mechanism that until this year constituted the Compustat University package. Compustat Xpressfeed will provide the replacement. WRDS has been working with XpressFeed data and utilities for a few months and we expect no major problems with the change-over. For most WRDS subscribers, the first use of data from the new format will come in August 2007, and we will provide a means to match and compare XpressFeed based items to the old format. The differences are relatively minor.

WRDS TIPS

Multiple SAS Jobs on the WRDS-Unix system. WRDS now allows any user to submit up to three SAS jobs at a time. Previously, a second SAS job could not be run until the first SAS job was completed.

Stata and SPSS datasets are now available on WRDS as output formats on all query pages. This output will save Stata and SPSS users the time and trouble of making and using intermediate files in plain text or csv formats, or converting SAS datasets using an add-in. Stata and SPSS sets can also be created in SAS programs using PROC EXPORT. See our the WRDS Support section for more information, as there are a few issues to be aware. For instance, Stata output will not preserve special missing value codes and SPSS output will truncate variable names longer than 8 characters.

NEW DATA

S&P Credit Ratings provides a history of short and long term commercial credit and corporate bond ratings at both the issuer/entity and issue/instrument levels. This set also includes Credit Watch and Credit Outlook information. The issuer ratings data starts in 1923 and covers more than 20,000 public and private firms. In addition, information for more than 200,000 distinct credit instruments starts in 1969. For convenience, WRDS queries provide the flexibility of performing searches based on GVKEY and CIK identifiers, which makes it possible to link this data to other sets.

The CRSP/Ziman Real Estate Data Series represents a collaborative effort between the Richard S. Ziman Center for Real Estate at the UCLA Anderson School of Management and The Center for Research in Security Prices at the University of Chicago. CRSP/Ziman database provides daily and monthly firm-specific information and indices on all REITs that have traded on the three primary exchanges (NYSE, AMEX and NASDAQ) since 1980. In addition to including stock price and returns data with carefully researched information regarding the population, characteristics, and history of REITs, this database includes several qualitative measures detailing market capitalizations, concentrations, and changes in index composition particularly important for evaluating the information in thinly populated index series which were common during the 1980s.

CUSIP Master File. WRDS now carries the CUSIP Master File database which provides CUSIP numbers and standardized descriptions for corporate, municipal and government securities offered in North America. CUSIP numbers and standardized descriptions are used by virtually all sectors of the financial industry, and are critical for the accurate and efficient clearance and settlement of securities and other financial instruments as well as back-office processing. The database includes information on more than 265,000 issuers and 5 million issues. It contains over 50 additional data attributes such as issuer's auditor, underwriter ownership restrictions and many others.

CIK Identifiers in Compustat Data. Compustat has created a GVKEY-CIK translation table that is available for all Compustat subscribers on WRDS. Our main Compustat web queries now allow a user to search Compustat quarterly and annual data by CIK, or to add CIK to the output. Please note that CIK has not been added directly to the COMPANN and COMPQTR datasets, but instead is in a separate table. CIKs have been added to the Compustat 'Names' table used by our Company Look Up tool. See the "Ask Us About CIK Identifiers" below.

For details on these additions, please see the WRDS website.

ASK US ABOUT...CIK IDENTIFIERS

CIK stands for Central Index Key, and it is used as the primary identifier in the SEC's Edgar system. All corporations and individuals are assigned a unique CIK number to use in all of their SEC filings. These identifiers are permanent in the sense that they do not change if a company changes its name, ticker symbol or even CUSIP issuer code. WRDS now has embedded CIK searching into the main Compustat datasets. Typically, CIK provides a one-to-one, unambiguous mapping to a Compustat GVKEY. Other data sets that have CIK as an identifier are Audit Analytics, Board Analyst, BvD Osiris, GSIOnline, and S&P Credit Ratings. We hope to see CIK added to other datasets to make it easier to link and merge data from different vendors.

UPCOMING CONFERENCES AND EVENTS

Eastern Finance Association (EFA) conference in New Orleans, LA at the Royal Sonesta Hotel on April 19-20, 2007. Please visit WRDS at the exhibit table.

Academy of Management(AOM) conference in Philadelphia, PA at the Philadelphia Convention Center on August 5-7, 2007.

If you need additional assistance with specific uses of data and data questions, please send an email to wrds-support@wharton.upenn.edu

For general information on WRDS, database access or vendor contact information, please visit http://wrds.wharton.upenn.edu

Wharton Research Data Services, 216 Vance Hall, 3733 Spruce Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104