S&P Capital IQ: company, capital-structure, and transactions data (licensed)

Licensed: not exercised here

S&P Capital IQ is a paid licensed product (S&P Global Market Intelligence), commonly reached through WRDS, so it carries no provenance badge: the access path below was not run in this session (no Capital IQ / WRDS credentials were available). The page documents the access route and the gotchas; treat it as unverified until someone exercises it through a licensed account. This is the honest grade under the institute’s Verified discipline.

S&P Capital IQ is S&P Global Market Intelligence’s platform covering public and private companies worldwide. It holds detailed capital structure / debt data (individual debt tranches, terms, and maturities), company financials, people / professionals, M&A and private-equity transactions, key developments (corporate events), and ESG-adjacent fields. In research it is most used for granular debt-structure data (Capital IQ Capital Structure) that Compustat does not break out, and for private-company and transactions coverage. A paper we distill uses it, for example Derrien, Krüger, Landier & Yao on ESG news and future cash flows.

• Cost: licensed, subscription. No free tier.
• Vendor: S&P Global Market Intelligence.
• Coverage: global public and private firms, with debt-tranche detail, transactions, and key developments. Most data runs from the 2000s, with some back-history.

Access (when licensed)

• Via WRDS or the Capital IQ platform. Many researchers reach Capital IQ through WRDS under the Capital IQ libraries (Capital Structure / debt, key developments, people, transactions). It is also available directly through the Capital IQ Pro platform and its API.
• Identifiers and linking. Capital IQ is keyed by its own companyid (and securityid). To join to Compustat, use the CIQ-to-gvkey linking table (ciqgvkey) rather than assuming a direct match.
• Credentials and a WRDS or Capital IQ account are required. Keep any credentials in .env, never hard-coded.

Gotchas (the ones that bite pipelines)

These are the failure modes to expect; they are documented, not verified here.

• Identifiers are not gvkey. Capital IQ uses companyid / securityid, not gvkey. The CIQ-to-Compustat link table (ciqgvkey) is essential and is imperfect: expect unmatched firms and many-to-one cases. Resolve the link before building a panel, and report the match rate.
• Capital Structure (debt) data is point-in-time / snapshot oriented. Reconstructing a firm’s debt as of a past date is tricky: some fields reflect the latest available value rather than the as-of value, so a naively built panel can be anachronistic. Pull as-of snapshots where available and pin the extraction date.
• Debt tranches can double-count or omit. Revolver availability versus drawn amounts, capitalized leases, and the classification of hybrids all complicate the totals; summing tranches need not equal balance-sheet debt. Reconcile to a known total before using tranche-level figures.
• Private-company financials are sparse. Coverage is conditional and not missing at random: private-firm financials are sparsely populated and are self-reported or estimated. Do not treat the populated subset as a random sample of private firms.
• Key developments change over time. Events are tagged by S&P, and both the taxonomy and the coverage shift across the history. Pin the extraction date and check the event-type definitions for the period you use.
• It will not match Compustat. Figures will not reconcile to Compustat line items because of different definitions and timing. Do not assume a Capital IQ field equals its nearest Compustat analogue; compare definitions first.
• WRDS table structure is nontrivial. The Capital IQ tables on WRDS are multiple linked tables, and the join keys must be applied carefully. A wrong join silently inflates or drops rows; validate row counts at each step.

Reference: the main Capital IQ modules

Module / library	What it holds
Capital Structure	Individual debt tranches, terms, maturities, and capital-structure summaries
Financials	Standardized company financial statements (public and private)
People / Professionals	Executives, board members, and other professionals
Transactions	M&A, private-equity, and financing transactions
Key Developments	Tagged corporate events (earnings, deals, management changes)
Linking (ciqgvkey)	CIQ companyid-to-Compustat gvkey crosswalk

Citation

Cite the provider and the modules used, e.g.: S&P Capital IQ (Capital Structure) / WRDS, accessed YYYY-MM-DD. State the modules / tables used (for example Capital Structure, Transactions, Key Developments), the identifier link applied (ciqgvkey), and the extraction date.