CRSP Eases Historical Data Access

Abstract

The Center for Research in Security Prices (CRSP), part of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, will later this year roll out new ways of accessing its database of mutual funds information, to make it easier for users at financial firms and academic institutions to utilize the data. Currently, clients can receive the data in SAS and ASCII flat files for use in MatLab or Microsoft Excel spreadsheets. But officials say an update to be rolled out in a quarterly release around July will introduce a tree-view menu that makes it easier to find the right files of data, and will offer data output formats that can be used by the SPSS and Stata statistical analysis tools via CRSP's Sift Securities Information Filtering Tool.