Data

• Stock & Index and Treasuries databases all ship on the 12th trading day of the month for monthly subscribers.
• TheCRSP/Compustat Merged database ships on the 10th trading day after the CRSP Researchers complete the monthly Stock update.
• The CRSP/Ziman REIT data ships on the last trading day of each month.  
• All quarterly subscribers receive databases shipped at the end of the month following the most recently completed calendar quarter with data current through that calendar quarter.
• Mutual Funds are transitioning to monthly updates, but will continue to ship quarterly. Targeted for July 2009, this represents an improvement that reduces the quarterly lag to a monthly lag, consistent with CRSP’s other quarterly shipments.

Yes. Our highly accurate and complete corporate action data for US equities is considered the gold standard. We offer descriptions of all distributions, dividend amounts, factors to adjust price and shares, declarations, ex-distribution, record and payment dates and security and company linking information.

CRSP end-of-day historical data covers roughly 26,500 stocks – active and inactive -- listed on the NYSE, NYSE American, NASDAQ, and ARCA exchanges. OTC bulletin board stocks are not included.

Professors James H. Lorie and Lawrence Fisher developed the design and manually collected the data for the original Master in 1960. It contained month-end prices and returns on NYSE common stocks from 1926. Over time, CRSP added end-of-day data from NYSE American and NASDAQ exchanges. Currently we receive NASDAQ data directly from the exchange, and end-of-day NYSE and NYSE American data from Interactive Data Corp. CRSP also utilizes several additional sources for its in-depth historical research.

There are four types of indexes:

• CRSP US Stock File Indexes
• CRSP Market Cap-Based Portfolios
• CRSP Indexes for the S&P 500 Universe
• CRSP US Treasury and Inflation Series

Detailed information is available here.

No. Unlike CUSIP or ticker, our PERMNO and PERMCO identifiers are permanent. That means that once the identifier is assigned, it is never reassigned. This allows for extremely accurate historical analysis because CRSP identifiers track any and all changes over time in the issues of a company, in its name, CUSIP, ticker, exchange or other company identifiers.

CUSIP numbers are not permanent and can change over time. Since CUSIP allows a security to be associated with more than one CUSIP number over its lifespan, this frequently makes for very poor match rates between different databases. This is especially problematic when researching the entire database of US equities, which includes many inactive stocks, thus creating serious inaccuracies and incomplete histories when backtesting data. CRSP's name history for a security, accessible by the unique identifier PERMNO, tracks changes in its CUSIP number. In CRSP, a PERMNO can be associated with more than one eight-digit CUSIP number over time, but an eight-digit CUSIP number can only be associated with one PERMNO.