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.