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Economics

Begin your research with resources recommended by the economics subject librarian, John Cocklin (john.cocklin@dartmouth.edu). Here you will find the key databases, indexes, datasets, and reference works in economics.

Financial Resources in Wharton Research Data Services (WRDS)

If you are taking econ 57, use your class account to login to WRDS at the following link:

Wharton WRDS Login

Otherwise, if you are a Dartmouth student, faculty or staff member, information on obtaining a WRDS account can be found at the following Research Guide:

Dartmouth - WRDS Key Resources

The relevant databases in WRDS for econ 57 are:

Compustat Execucomp - Offers extensive, transparent executive compensation data, including current, historical, total compensation, executive options, and compensation of industry peers.

Compustat North America and Global - When you want to find out more about the companies themselves. Includes fundamental and market information on active and inactive publicly held companies. It provides more than 300 annual and 100 quarterly Income Statement, Balance Sheet, Statement of Cash Flows, and supplemental data items.

How to use Execucomp and Compustat North America video. This video walks you through building a dataset with Execucomp and with Compustat and also discusses the possibilities and techniques for merging the two datasets.

NOTE: You may want to merge the Execucomp and Compustat fundamental data. As an example, in Stata let's say you want to merge Execucomp data, which has multiple rows per fiscal year, with Compustat North America fundamental annual data which only has one row per fiscal year. You would rename the matching variables to be the same in each file

rename old varname new varname

and then merge the two files using an M:1 (many rows to one row) command.

merge m:1 year gvkey using filename2

BoardEx - Contains extensive data on the boards of publicly listed and notable private companies from around the world. Profiles of directors and senior management including gender, age, education, nationality, employment, and compensation.

How to use BoardEx video. This video walks you through (1) identifying directors and executives for specific companies and (2) using that identifying information to pull more detailed information about them, for example education, age, and gender.

ISS (Institutional Shareholder Services) Directors Data - Universe of S&P 1500 companies. Includes a range of variables related to individual board directors (e.g., name, age, tenure, gender, committee memberships, primary employer and title, etc.)

Census Public Use Microdata