ACC 498: Senior Seminar In Accounting: Find Data

FIND DATA TO SUPPORT YOUR RESEARCH

As you work on choosing a topic, be sure that you can get the data that you’ll need to perform your analysis.

U.S. statistics – economic, demographic, and other

• Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED) – Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis

• U.S. Census: data sets and data access tools

• Data.gov - access to datasets from dozens of government agencies. Includes a list of data by agencies; or try a keyword search from the Data Catalog page

• Department of Commerce, Bureau of Economic Analysis

• Small Business Administration (SBA) -- Open data

• International Trade Administration (Department of Commerce): Trade data and analysis

Accounting statistics

• SEC (beyond EDGAR) -- SEC and Market Data; includes Financial Statements Data Sets (or the much more expansive Financial Statements and Notes Data Sets)
• SEC -- Market Structure Data Downloads
• PCAOB Inspections -- including firm inspection reports (can be sorted by specified criteria) and board public reports
• PCAOB Enforcement -- including settled disciplinary orders and adjudicated enforcement actions

Tax statistics

• SOI tax stats (Statistics of Income) -- from the IRS
  https://www.irs.gov/statistics/soi-tax-stats-statistics-of-income
  • Includes SOI Tax Stats: Products, Publications and Papers
  • Also features the IRS Data Book

• Other IRS tax statistics -- Tax Stats
  https://www.irs.gov/statistics
  • Includes Historical Data Tables

Data sets from published research (mostly in Economics)

• National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) data sets.
  • Also includes a link to Economic Indicators and Releases.
• The Billion Prices Project: "an academic initiative that uses prices collected from hundreds of online retailers around the world on a daily basis to conduct research in macro and international economics."

International statistics

• International Financial Statistics (IFS) -- from the International Monetary Fund [see about IFS for details about this very comprehensive database]
  • Quick links include data tables by country and by indicator
  • Use the Query function to extract data points for multiple indicators and/or multiple countries across multiple time periods

• International statistical agencies (scroll to the end of the page for official governmental statistics sites; listed alphabetically by country name)
  https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/international-programs/about/related-sites.html

Market data, market returns, securities pricing, other financial statistics

• Fama and French Data Library (Dartmouth)
  http://mba.tuck.dartmouth.edu/pages/faculty/ken.french/data_library.html
  Investment returns on sample portfolios

• WSJ MarketWatch -- Markets Data: search by ticker; browse by region, index, industry, etc.
  http://www.marketwatch.com/tools/marketsummary            

• Financial Times markets data
  http://markets.ft.com/markets/overview.asp

• Bloomberg [located in the School of Business Financial Learning Center] -- instructions on setting up an account, a listing of the data available, and basic navigational instructions:
  https://business.tcnj.edu/about-the-school-of-business/financial-learning-center/
• These Bloomberg user guides from other schools may also be helpful:
  • Boston University
    http://library.bu.edu/bloombergtutorial
  • Columbia University
    https://guides.library.columbia.edu/bloomberg

Data and statistics sites from TCNJ Library

• ICPSR (the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research)
  https://library.tcnj.edu/search-tools/databases-a-z/icpsr-inter-university-consortium-for-political-and-social-research-data-archive/

• Statista -- search by keyword or topic to find statistics; source details may provide pointers to underlying data
  https://library.tcnj.edu/search-tools/databases-a-z/statista/