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ECON 480 Resource Guide

for just about everything. The trick is to discover what existing data are the best match to the ideal data you need to test the prediction of your model. This guide provides just a sampling of links to data warehouses.

Wharton Research Data Services

Wharton Research Data Services (WRDS) is an online data platform that specializes in company financials (financial statements, audit and regulatory filings, banks, segments / industry data, compensation, intellectual property), financial markets, prices, and returns (stock prices, analyst estimates, bonds and fixed income, mutual fund / hedge fund, ETF returns, derivatives / options, REITs, currency exchange rates), ownership, mergers and acquisitions, sustainability/ESG, economics, marketing, news, and healthcare.

WRDS' strengths include:

  • Historical data with a variety of output formats
  • A shared web interface and retrieval process for all datasets
  • A linking suite to combine data from different vendors
  • The ability to query the data from statistical software (SAS, R, STATA, Python, MATLAB, and PostgreSQL)

WRDS is primarily intended for use by AU professors and graduate students conducting academic research or teaching courses with assignments that require the analysis of WRDS data, though upper level undergraduates might also find the data useful. 

For more information about WRDS, please see the AU guide: https://subjectguides.library.american.edu/wrds