By Tee Lip Hwe, Research Librarian, Accountancy & Business (Finance) & Aaron Tay, Lead, Data Services
SDC deals, the useful and important M&A (merger and acquisitions) dataset is now available via Wharton Research Data Services (WRDS). This follows the retirement of the old legacy SDC Platinum desktop application in 2023 by its vendor LSEG/Refinitiv.
About the dataset
The new SDC dataset is made available via WRDS in three core components, namely Merger & Acquisition (M&A), New Issues (NI), and Joint Ventures and Alliances (JV&A).
How often is SDC data used? A search on InK, SMU’s Institutional Repository reveals a total at least 17 research papers from LKCSB (71%) and SOA (29%) that uses SDC data between 2021 and 2023. Nine of these papers were published in FT50 journals.
All this shows how important SDC data is to research in accounting and finance.
Why change to the WRDS platform
Previously, the data for SDC was only available through the old SDC Platinum desktop application, which was accessible within the Investment Studio (as it was previously known) in the Li Ka Shing Library. The application was running on an outdated version of Windows, which made it exceptionally slow, and the user interface was also outdated, making it much more difficult to use than it should have been.
In comparison, moving to the popular and modern cloud based WRDS platform solves all these problems, giving you unlimited access by users and downloads.
If you are a regular user of the WRDS platform for other datasets, you would be familiar with features like the ability to extract data not only via the Web Query Form but also via avenues such as SAS Studio, RStudio Server, JupyterHub and WRDS Cloud, allowing you multiple ways to access and extract data using code if you wish for a more reproducible workflow.
And it’s not just extraction of SDC data, because WRDS is a common platform that hosts many important finance, accounting and economic datasets such as Compustat, CRSP, you can combine the data you extract from SDC with these other sources in a more seamless way. This combined with the excellent documentation and WRDS support service, is why we believe this change will be one that will hugely benefit our users!
If you find there is missing data from the legacy platform that isn’t in our WRDS packages, do contact us for assistance.
Start exploring SDC via WRDS today!
For help, please contact: Tee Lip Hwe, Research Librarian, Accountancy & Business (Finance)