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Software for viewing pages and
downloading information can be found at:
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A General Source
Lexis Nexis
offers a comprehensive site which is always a good place to begin.
Offerings include a variety of financial reports, statistical
databases, court cases and much more. There is also a section on
current and recent news items.
Business & Finance News
The Economist is
an exceptional news magazine written from a sound economics
perspective.
The CNN Financial Network
contains up-to-date news from CNN.
The Wall Street Journal also
has an on-line service. Some information is by subscription only, but
you can obtain a trial subscription.
The Financial Times of
London offers a more international perspective.
Fortune and Business Week are both
available online as well. From the Fortune site, you can download
Fortune 500 and 1000 data in Excel format that may be helpful for I.S..
Euromoney and World Link
also offer international financial information.
Databases
- The College subscribes to the COMPUSTAT Industrial Data Base
which contains data from annual reports, 10-K reports, and other
sources for over 4000 firms over 20 years. These data can be downloaded
to your Alpha account and then used by SHAZAM on the Alpha or on a
Macintosh computer.
- The Value
Line Investment Survey is useful for some types of security
analysis. It gives one-page summaries in pdf format containing up
to 10 years of financial data for many publically-traded companies.
There is also a page with concentration
data for manufacturing industries including number of firms and
industry sales. There is a spreadsheet
with industry data from the 1992 census and a link to the 1997 census (the latest
available). Industry data are based on NAICS or SIC definitions. A
table that links the two definitions is here.
Alta Vista Search
There are also a number of sources of data on the internet. Alta Vista is a fast and
comprehensive search engine for all kinds of information.
Data Links
General indices and pointers to Economics and Financial data
can be found at:
Some resources that we have found to be especially useful
for Business Economics research are linked below. Let us know if you discover
some links that should be listed here.
- Annual
Demographic Survey published jointly by the Bureau of the Census
and the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) is the primary source of
detailed information on income and work experience in the United
States. Numerous publications based on this survey are issued each year
by the Bureaus of Labor Statistics and Census. A public-use microdata
file is available for private researchers, who also produce many
academic and policy-related documents based on these data. Click
here for detailed instructions on how to obtain and use these data.
- Working Papers list
is a comprehensive list of working papers that has pointers to current
working papers organized by topic, university or college, and by
author. This may give you a head start on finding an IS topic,
especially in the finance area.
- The Bureau of the CENSUS
has a large site with data on many subjects. Some data are fee based,
but much
information can be obtained in Adobe Acrobat format at no charge.
- The Bureau of Labor
Statistics site has a variety of labor economcs data and liks to
other US and international sites.
- The Current
Population Survey is a monthly survey of about 50,000 households
conducted by the Bureau of the Census for the Bureau of Labor
Statistics. The survey has been conducted for more than 50 years. It is
the primary source of information on the labor force characteristics of
the U.S. population.
- FEDSTATS contains
a number of links, but is especially useful for regional data by state
and county for such variables as crime rates, education, occupations,
health statistics, etc.
- The Ohio
State University Financial Economics Server.
- Industry
Statistics at the University of Michigan.
- Those interested in poverty statistics will find this link
helpful.
- The Statistical
Abstract of the US is available online.
- University
of Michigan Current Business Statistics
- Federal
Reserve Bank of St. Louis Data series (FRED) contains a
comprehensive set of monetary and macroeconomic statistics that you can
download. "Zipped" data requires Stuffit Expander or ZipIt! to unpack
before you can use it.
- Fortune
500 or Global
500 data. A variety of data on large firms annually compiled.
- Stock quotations can be obtained from a number of services.
Some of these data can be downloaded
in text (.txt) format and you can then open the file with EXCEL or a
word processing program such as Microsoft Word. Other data have been
compressed, usually in an IBM-format (.zip) which can be expanded by
using a program line Winzip (under Windows) or directly from the Finder
in Mac OSX. Some older Mac files are compressed with Stuffit a
free expander for which can be downloaded from the link on the
left. A platform-independent document reader is Adobe
Acrobat.
Personal Computer Choice. Historically, the College
has been a Macintosh-oriented institution. An early pioneer in Campus
networking, we appreciated the superior networking capabilities of the
Macintosh platform. With the conversion to a modern fiber-optic network
and
the expansion of web-based information, however, it is now possible
easily to connect Macintosh computers and PC's operating under Windows
(XP Professional or higher only)
to the same network. Most work that economists do is independent of
platform choice. Industry-standard Microsoft Excel and Word can be used
on either Macintosh or PCs. The Macintosh computers in Morgan 217 have
Stata on them for you to use. Modern Macintosh computers can run both
Mac OSX and Windows. If you are using a
Windows PC, consult with your instructor about how best to integrate it
with your course work.
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