LPC DealScan: syndicated-loan data (licensed)

Access confirmed via a licensed WRDS session

The keystone query SELECT * FROM dealscan.currfacpricing LIMIT 1 was run against the live dataset through a licensed WRDS session on 2026-06-09, so this page carries the amber “Access confirmed (licensed)” badge. Reproducing the access path still requires the reader’s own WRDS account and the institution’s DealScan entitlement (licensed, not open).

DealScan is a syndicated-loan database, built by the Loan Pricing Corporation (now part of LSEG / Refinitiv). It records corporate loan deals (packages) and the facilities (tranches) within them: amount, all-in spread and pricing, maturity, loan type and purpose, covenants, and the lender syndicate with each lender’s share. It is a common source in bank-lending and loan-pricing research: used in, for example Flanagan for the value of bank lending, Anderson, Du & Schlusche for global-bank loan exposures, and Griffin, Nini & Smith for loan covenant structure.

• Cost: licensed, subscription. No free tier. Most academics reach it through WRDS.
• Vendor: LSEG / Refinitiv (Loan Pricing Corporation).
• Coverage: syndicated and large bilateral corporate loans globally, with the deepest coverage of the US syndicated market; history back to the late 1980s, thinner early on.

Access (when licensed)

• Through WRDS. The common academic path is the WRDS DealScan tables; see WRDS / CRSP / Compustat for the connection recipe.
• Direct from LSEG. Through LSEG’s loan-data products and the LoanConnector lineage, keyed on DealScan facility and package identifiers.
• Credentials are required either way. Keep them in .env, never hard-coded.

Gotchas (the ones that bite pipelines)

These are the failure modes to expect; they are documented.

• It is an origination snapshot, not loan performance. DealScan records the deal as arranged; it does not track drawn balances, repayments, or defaults over the life of the loan. Do not read it as a performance panel.
• The DealScan-to-Compustat link is a separate, imperfect step. Matching borrowers to public-firm identifiers uses the legacy Chava-Roberts link, now the WRDS DealScan-Compustat linking table, which has coverage gaps and vintage breaks. Re-merge deliberately and report match rates.
• Coverage skews to large syndicated deals. Small and bilateral loans are under-covered, and early-1990s coverage is thin; absence of a loan is not absence of borrowing.
• Amendments create multiple records. A single facility can appear several times as it is amended; decide whether you want origination terms or the amended terms and deduplicate accordingly.
• Package versus facility level. Many fields live at the facility (tranche) level and others at the package (deal) level; mixing the two double-counts or mis-weights. State the level of analysis.
• Pricing-field definitions matter. The headline “all-in-drawn spread” bundles fees in a specific way and is missing for many facilities; state the pricing field and how you handle missing spreads.
• Identifier migration. Legacy LoanConnector identifiers and the newer LSEG identifiers coexist across vintages; pin which identifier scheme your pull uses before linking across files.

Citation

Cite the product and vendor, e.g.: LPC DealScan syndicated-loan data, LSEG / Refinitiv, accessed via WRDS; data licensed and accessed YYYY-MM-DD. State the data vintage, the level of analysis (package or facility), the pricing field, and the borrower-link table used.