Compustat Global: non-US company fundamentals (licensed)

Licensed: not exercised here

Compustat Global is a paid S&P product (S&P Global Market Intelligence), so it carries no provenance badge: the access path below was not run in this session (no WRDS or S&P 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.

Compustat Global is S&P Global Market Intelligence’s database of fundamental (balance sheet, income statement, cash flow) and market data for publicly traded companies outside North America. The North American counterpart is plain Compustat (Compustat North America). It covers tens of thousands of non-US firms across many countries, standardized into a common data model so that cross-country comparisons are possible. Papers we distill use it, for example Faccio et al. on cross-country impediments to the Schumpeterian process of firm replacement (creative destruction).

• Cost: licensed, subscription. No free tier.
• Vendor: S&P Global Market Intelligence; the product lineage traces back to Standard & Poor’s Compustat.
• Coverage: non-US public firms, annual and some interim, from roughly 1987 with deeper coverage in later years; includes Global Security Daily for prices.

Access (when licensed)

• Most commonly through WRDS. Compustat Global is reached under the WRDS Compustat - Global library. Key tables: g_funda (annual fundamentals), g_company (header / metadata), and g_secd (security daily prices). Currency and exchange-rate handling lives alongside g_funda through the companion exchange-rate table.
• S&P direct feed. It is also available through an S&P Global direct data feed for institutions that license it outside WRDS.
• Credentials 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.

• Currency: fundamentals are in native currency. Line items in g_funda are reported in each firm’s local currency (curcd), and you must convert using the companion exchange-rate table before aggregating or comparing across countries. Mixing currencies silently is the classic error and produces meaningless sums and ratios.
• The Global data model differs from Compustat North America. Different variable names, the g_ table prefix, and different fiscal-period conventions mean North American Compustat code does not port directly. Map variables deliberately rather than assuming a North American name exists in Global.
• The key is gvkey + iid (issue id). Securities are keyed by company (gvkey) plus issue (iid); a single firm can have multiple issues or share classes. Apply the primary-issue flag, or you will double-count firms and attach prices to the wrong security.
• Fiscal-year-end heterogeneity across countries. Fiscal year-ends vary widely by country, so aligning datadate / fyear needs care when forming annual panels; a naive calendar-year merge misaligns observations.
• Accounting-standard heterogeneity. Countries adopted IFRS at different dates and many used local GAAP before that, so line items are not strictly comparable across countries or over time. Treat cross-country level comparisons with caution and lean on standardized fields where possible.
• Coverage and backfill. Early-year coverage is thinner, and inclusion has changed over time. Retain inactive firms to avoid survivorship bias; dropping delisted or dead firms biases the panel toward survivors.
• Linking is separate work. Joining to North American Compustat or to returns data requires care: gvkey values can overlap, but the databases are separate, so do not assume a shared gvkey resolves to the same entity without checking.

Reference: the main g_ tables

Table	What it holds
g_funda	Annual fundamentals (balance sheet, income statement, cash flow), in native currency
g_company	Company header and metadata (identifiers, country, industry)
g_secd	Global Security Daily: daily security prices and related market data

Citation

Cite the provider and the database, e.g.: S&P Compustat Global, via WRDS, accessed YYYY-MM-DD. State the WRDS library (Compustat - Global), the tables used (for example g_funda, g_company, g_secd), the currency and exchange-rate handling applied, and the extraction date.