Wharton Research Data Services Makes Complex Financial Research as Simple as Surfing the Web

The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania is recognized around the world for its innovative leadership and broad academic strengths across every major business discipline and at every level of management education. As the nation's first collegiate business school, Wharton is committed to creating the highest value in the understanding of business and the practice of management worldwide.

Developed in 1993 for Wharton faculty, the Wharton Research Data Services system (WRDS) has made an extensive collection of financial data available on the Internet using a variety of SAS^® solutions. The data on WRDS covers thousands of companies and allows faculty, researchers, PhD candidates and students to query security prices and trading volume, income and balance sheet items, stock market indices, bond prices and interest rates, mutual fund and stock ownership information, options data and a wide array of macroeconomic time series. International data, marketing and industry reports are also available. WRDS maintains distribution agreements for specific data sets with each data vendor and stores the accumulated data on the Wharton UNIX network. The data can be accessed by the user whose school maintains a license agreement with WRDS and subscribes to the appropriate data sources.

“SAS has made considerable efforts in delivering various tools that deliver data via the Web,” said Paul J. Ratnaraj, director of Core Systems, Data Services & Operations at Wharton’s Computing & Information Technology Center. He said they chose to use SAS for data management and analysis because it offered the most comprehensive, easy-to-use solution.
 
Professor Richard J. Herring states, “The beauty of the system is that wherever you go, whatever system you use at the School, the data is accessible and appears in the identical form.” According to Dr. Herring, the key benefit this provides is that it “reduces the time researchers spend extracting data and allows them to concentrate on their analysis.”

WRDS offers a number of advantages for faculty and students by providing universal availability, ease of use, access to PhD researchers and technical experts, and reduced time and cost for maintenance and support. Today, the WRDS system is licensed to 250 leading universities and government institutions worldwide.

About the Wharton School and WRDS
The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania – founded in 1881 as the first collegiate business school – is recognized globally for intellectual leadership and ongoing innovation across every major discipline of business education. The most comprehensive source of business knowledge in the world, Wharton bridges research and practice through its broad engagement with the global business community. The school has more than 4,600 undergraduate, MBA, executive MBA and doctoral students; more than 8,000 annual participants in executive education programs; and an alumni network of more than 82,000 graduates.

WRDS has become the locus for quantitative data research and is recognized by the academic and financial research community around the world as the leading business intelligence tool. Today the WRDS community consists of scores of prominent universities, research institutions and nonprofit organizations.