Compustat

Compustat is a proprietary financial database of standardized company financial statement data for active and inactive publicly traded firms, maintained by S&P Global Market Intelligence. The database aggregates annual and quarterly financial statements, including income statements, balance sheets, and cash flow statements, and links them to market information and corporate identifiers such as GVKEY. It also includes supplementary data such as industry classification, geographic information, and segment data, as well as historical restatements and per-share measures.

The coverage started with North American data (Compustat North America) and has expanded to global coverage (Compustat Global), encompassing a broad set of public companies and, over time, delisted firms as well. Data are standardized to enable cross-company comparisons and longitudinal analysis, with currency conversions and accounting adjustments applied where appropriate. The dataset is designed to support consistent financial analysis across time and jurisdictions.

Researchers and practitioners use Compustat for empirical finance and accounting research, benchmarking, portfolio analysis, and risk assessment. It is widely used in academic studies, corporate finance modeling, and regression analyses such as factor models, as well as in valuation and credit work. Access is provided through subscriptions to S&P Global Market Intelligence, often in combination with related datasets (for example, CRSP in U.S. research). Users should be aware of limitations, including coverage gaps, the need to interpret restatements carefully, and differences arising from jurisdiction-specific GAAP.