INVESTMENT DATA BASES AND THE PROBLEMS OF DATA CONFORMING TO GENERALLY ACCEPTED ACCOUNTING PRINCIPLES
Abstract
Investment data bases hold information relevant to marketable securities
and are used for investment decisions. Much of the data comes from
annual corporate reports, and cannot be wholely relied upon because of the
leeway provided by generally accepted accounting principles. One solution
is an SEC sponsored national data base that has strict data quality
controls. The other solution is to use data base filters with data bases
that contain unadjusted corporate report data, so that data for firms
that pass the filters can be adjusted and reprocessed manually.
Adjustment of all corporate report data before entry to the data base
is prohibitively expensive. The problem will become more widespread as
personal investment data bases proliferate due to the availability
of personal computers with large capacity hard disks, such as the IBM PC/AT.
Description
Keywords
Computer Science