FactSet Revere: supply-chain relationships (licensed)

Licensed: not exercised here

FactSet Revere is a paid licensed product (FactSet Research Systems), sometimes reached through WRDS, so it carries no provenance badge: the access path below was not run in this session (no FactSet / 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.

FactSet Revere (the FactSet Supply Chain Relationships, formerly the Revere Data relationship database) maps directed business relationships between firms: supplier, customer, competitor, and strategic-partner links, each with a relationship type and date range. Relationships are sourced from public disclosures (annual reports, investor presentations, press releases, regulatory filings) rather than from a transaction ledger, so the graph reflects what firms disclose about their counterparties. It is one of the two standard sources for firm-level production-network links, the other being Compustat Segments (whose principal-customer disclosures cover an earlier period and fewer links). A paper we distill uses both together: Grigoris & Segal splice Compustat Segments (1976-2002) with FactSet Revere (2003-2019) to build upstream and downstream supply-chain exposures.

• Cost: licensed, subscription. No free tier.
• Vendor: FactSet Research Systems (the relationship product originated at Revere Data, which FactSet acquired).
• Coverage: broad global coverage of public companies, denser from the mid-2000s onward; relationships are time-stamped with start and (where disclosed) end dates.

Access (when licensed)

• Through FactSet or WRDS. The relationship tables are reached through a FactSet workstation/API entitlement, or through WRDS where the institution licenses the FactSet Supply Chain Relationships product. Check which route your institution provides.
• Keyed by FactSet entity identifiers. Links are between FactSet’s own entity IDs (and security IDs); an extract is a list of directed edges (source entity, target entity, relationship type, start/end date) that you map to your firm universe.
• Terminal or API 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.

• Disclosure-driven, not transaction-driven. A link exists because a firm disclosed the relationship, not because a flow was observed. Coverage is biased toward larger, more transparent firms and toward relationships material enough to disclose; absence of a link is not evidence of no relationship.
• No weights or flow magnitudes. Revere records that a relationship exists and its type, not the dollar volume of trade between the two firms. If you need edge weights you must impute them (e.g. from Compustat Segments customer sales or from input-output shares); do not treat the unweighted graph as a flow matrix.
• Directionality and roles. Supplier-versus-customer direction matters for upstream/downstream exposure measures; confirm the role convention in the field you read, and remember the same pair can carry multiple link types.
• Splicing with Compustat Segments. The two sources overlap in the mid-2000s and use different identifiers and disclosure rules; a naive concatenation double-counts or drops links at the seam. Pin the splice year and reconcile identifiers across the boundary.
• Stale and lingering links. End dates are only as good as the disclosure that retired a relationship; some links persist in the data after they have ended in reality. Use the as-of date when building a point-in-time network.
• Identifier linking. FactSet entity IDs must be linked to CRSP/Compustat (e.g. via CUSIP/permno crosswalks); the join has known mismatches, especially for subsidiaries and reorganized entities. Verify the link rather than assuming a clean one-to-one map.

Reference: relationship link types

Link type	Direction	Typical use
Supplier	source supplies target	Upstream exposure of the target
Customer	source sells to target	Downstream exposure of the source
Competitor	undirected	Peer/rival sets
Partner	undirected	Joint ventures, alliances

Each edge carries a relationship type and a start/end date; build the point-in-time network from the as-of date you need.

Citation

Cite the provider and database, e.g.: FactSet Supply Chain Relationships (Revere) / FactSet Research Systems, accessed YYYY-MM-DD. State the entity universe, the relationship types used, the as-of date, and the access route (FactSet or WRDS) so the network is reproducible.