Execucomp

Execucomp is short for Executive Compensation. This database provides data on the compensation
of executives.

Access

Execucomp is offered through the interface of WRDS (Wharton Research Data Services).
Execucomp is part of Compustat-Capital IQ > North America. You can find WRDS in the list
of financial databases on the website of the EDSC. To get access to WRDS (and Execucomp) you
need a VPN-connection or get access via EZproxy. WRDS also asks for your email address, this has
to be your ERNA email address. WRDS sends a link to this email address; this link is valid for 14
days. After 14 days you can request a new link.

You can find Execucomp in the menu on the right below Compustat Quarterly Updates.

First of all, you need to choose the section in Execucomp you want. Annual Compensation provides
annual data on the financial compensation that executives have received. This is the commonly used
section of Execucomp and because of this we will use this section further in this manual. If you want
to use a different section of Execucomp than this manual is still useful, because all other sections
work in a similar way.

Different sections in Execucomp that are also frequently used are:

Director Compensation: This section is similar to Annual Compensation, except that Director
Compensation merely provides data on directors instead of executives. Also, Director
Compensation only provides data from 2005 onwards. Last, Director Compensation has less
data-items available.
Pension Benefits: This database provides some variables on the pensions of executives. For
example, it gives data on the total amount of pension payments that have been made in a
specific year, the discounted value of the pension assets and the number of years that a
certain executive has contributed to a pension plan. The data is available for 2006 onwards.
Plan Based Awards: Similar to Pension Benefits, but it provides data on rewards other than
pensions.

In Annual Compensation, you can download data in the following four steps:

Step 1: What data range do you want to use?

Choose the time window for which you want information on by using the dropdownmenus. The data
goes back to 1992. In your final output, (almost) every firm year will lead to several datapoints. This
is because in a certain year almost every firm has more than one executive. Each executive for each
year will be one datapoint.

Step 2: How would you like to search the database?

Determine which companies you want to have in your dataset. There are three ways to find
companies. The first way is manually entering the company codes. If you do not know the codes by
heart you can look them up by using the Code Lookup Link. After your search criterion has
provided the results you can select the relevant companies and pick one identifier. After this, click on
"Add checked codes to your code list". If necessary, you can look for more companies after this in
the same way and put them also in the list. Make sure you always pick the same identifier! When you
have entered all the companies in the list click on "Insert List in Query" to automatically enter all the
identifiers in the typing field.

Uploading a file containing company codes is the second way to find companies in Execucomp. For
example, if you have a list of TICKER codes you can upload this file in Execucomp. In this case,
make sure to select TICKER in the menu above. When you use CUSIPs, they should have 8
digits. WRDS only accepts notepad files (.txt formats)!

The last option is searching the entire database. This option may take some time to download all the
data.

Besides entering identifiers or searching the entire database you can additionally choose one or two
conditions. Students frequently only want to include executives that have received a total
compensation of at least 1 million dollars per year. To this, select the total compensation variable and
enter > 1000 (total compensation is in units of $ 1000). Another frequently used condition is to only
include CEO's in the dataset. To do this, select CEOANN and enter "CEO".

Step 3: What variables do you want in your query?

Choose the relevant variables.

In the block Company Information you can find general data on the company like the name,
identifiers, industry codes and address.
In the block Executive Information you can find non-financial data on the executives like
name, gender, age at this moment, whether or not (s)he is currently the CEO or CFO and the
date they entered the company.
 In Compensation Data you find a lot of data on the compensation of executives. Most of the
times, this financial data types are in units of $ 1000, but this is not always the case.
Therefore it is recommended to click on the question mark (if available) that provides
information on the unit of the variable. At the top of the page you can click
Manuals/Overviews > Execucomp > ExecuComp Data Definitions to see more definitions.

Step 4: How would you like the query output?

For example, choose Excel spreadsheet (*.xlsx) if you want an Excel file. Click on Submit to
download the data. A new page will appear. You have to wait for the link to the data to appear. Save
the file before opening.