Refinitiv Worldscope: global company fundamentals (licensed)

Licensed: not exercised here

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

Worldscope is Refinitiv’s (LSEG) global database of standardized company fundamentals: balance sheet, income statement, and cash flow items, along with ratios, per-share data, and descriptive information for public companies across many countries, with a long international history. It is one of the two main sources of international company fundamentals, the other being Compustat Global. Worldscope is the fundamentals complement to Datastream (which supplies prices, returns, and market data) and is frequently used together with it. A paper we distill uses it: Faccio et al. on impediments to the Schumpeterian process of creative destruction.

• Cost: licensed, subscription. No free tier.
• Vendor: Refinitiv / LSEG (lineage traces through Thomson Reuters / Thomson Financial, where the product was the Worldscope database).
• Coverage: tens of thousands of firms across developed and emerging markets, with annual and interim fundamentals; history reaches into the 1980s, with deeper and broader coverage in later years.

Access (when licensed)

• Through Datastream or WRDS. Worldscope fundamentals are typically reached through Datastream, where they are exposed as Datastream datatypes (the Worldscope “WC” item codes), or through WRDS where the institution licenses it. Check which route your institution provides.
• Keyed by Worldscope identifiers and item codes. Data is keyed by Worldscope’s own company identifier and by item (“WC”) codes; an extract is a set of WC items pulled for a list of firms over a date range.
• 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.

• The “WC” item codes are the schema, and you must map them carefully. A Worldscope extract is a list of WC item codes, and the same labeled item can be computed differently than its Compustat analog. As a result Worldscope and Compustat Global do not reconcile item-for-item; do not assume a WC item equals the same-named Compustat field.
• Accounting-standard heterogeneity limits comparability. Firms report under local GAAP or IFRS with different adoption dates by country, so even after Worldscope’s standardization, cross-country comparisons of a given item remain imperfect. Treat cross-border comparisons with caution.
• Currency. Fundamentals are reported in native currency and need explicit conversion before any cross-country aggregation or comparison; do not mix currencies in a panel.
• Backfill and survivorship. Worldscope has added historical data and firms retroactively, and the active list excludes dead firms; building a sample from only currently covered firms biases it toward survivors. Pin the extraction date and source a delisted/dead-firm list when survivorship matters.
• Identifier linking. Worldscope codes must be linked to Datastream mnemonics and to returns and prices; the Worldscope-to-Datastream link is the usual join and has known mismatches. Verify the link rather than assuming a clean one-to-one map.
• Coverage and item availability vary by country and year. Item availability and firm coverage are uneven, with more missingness in emerging markets and in early years. Do not read missing as zero, and check item-level availability before conditioning a sample on it.
• Documented data errors. The comparative-database literature documents discrepancies between Worldscope and Compustat Global; do not treat individual items as ground truth. Cross-check material observations when a single firm or item drives the result.

Reference: representative WC item codes

WC code	Item (category)
WC02999	Total assets (balance sheet)
WC03351	Total liabilities (balance sheet)
WC03995	Common equity (balance sheet)
WC01001	Net sales / revenue (income statement)
WC01651	Net income before preferred dividends (income statement)
WC04860	Net cash flow, operating activities (cash flow)
WC05001	Market price, year end (per-share / market)
WC05101	Earnings per share (per-share)

Item codes are the extraction schema; pull the specific WC items you need and record them. Availability differs by country and year.

Citation

Cite the provider and database, e.g.: Worldscope / Refinitiv (LSEG), accessed YYYY-MM-DD. State the WC item codes used, the access route (Datastream or WRDS), and the extraction date so the sample is reproducible.