Department of Economics
The College of Wooster

The following instructions are to be used for obtaining data from the Industrial Compustat files. They replace the instructions previously issued in 2000 and supersede the information in the I.S. handbook. The Compustat database contains 350 data items for 20 years for each of over 4000 firms. The data are from Annual Reports, 10-K Reports, and other items submitted by the companies. You can view a listing of the data items from this page. The definitions of these items can be obtained from Professor Sell or from the Compustat manual in Morgan Hall 215. The companies in the compustat annual file can be viewed at this link.

The College's subscription to these materials allows you to generate large samples for your empirical work. Access Compustat via the web from this link (campus access only). Detailed instructions including information about how to parse the data in EXCEL are found in this pdf file.

(Revised 29 September 2002 by Jws.)