Worldscope meets Compustat: A Comparison of Financial Databases

Abstract

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Why do some insurers become systemically relevant?

“…Financial accounting data are retrieved from Thomson Reuters Worldscope. We chose to retrieve data from Datastream rather than Compustat due to the wider market coverage of firms in the former after 1998 (see, e.g., Ulbricht and Weiner, 2005, for a comparison of both databases) and the availability of some additional data items for insurers. Our initial sample consists of 154 insurance companies, from which we exclude companies for which Datastream does not contain stock prices for the years 2006 to 2008.…”

A new measure of financial development: Theory leads measurement

“…Worldscope covers 95% of all public firms in the world by market value. Ulbricht and Weiner (2005) study the quality and coverage of Worldscope. They find that the data included in Worldscope are of better quality and contain more detailed presentation of the accounting statements when compared to the widely used Compustat database for U.S. firms.…”

Evolution of Capital Structure in East Asia—Corporate Inertia or Endeavours?

“…The analysis is based on the Worldscope firm level data for all listed non‐financial firms in the sample countries, which have been widely used (for example, see Claessens et al. (2000) and Ulbricht and Weiner (2005)). The number of firms and total observations in each country over the sample period 1994–2002 are summarized in Table 1.…”