Align years in Compustat and CRSP

[Jannis Schwarz]

Hi,
I have a question regarding fyear in Compustat and CRSP.
Compustat gives the following explanation for fyear in connection with fyr: Fiscal Year

Mnemonic	Periodicity	Format	Units
FYEAR	Annual	Date	YYYY
FYEARQ	Quarterly	Date	YYYY

This item represents the fiscal year of the current fiscal year-end month. If the current fiscal year-end month falls in January through May, this item is the current calendar year minus 1 year. If the current fiscal year-end month falls in June through December, this item is the current calendar year. For example:

Calendar Year	Fiscal Year-end Month	Fiscal Year
2005	January (1)	2004
2005	February (2)	2004
2005	March (3)	2004
2005	April (4)	2004
2005	May (5)	2004
2005	June (6)	2005
2005	July (7)	2005
2005	August (8)	2005
2005	September (9)	2005
2005	October (10)	2005
2005	November (11)	2005
2005	December (12)	2005

Thus I created the following Code to assign CRSP monthly returns to the correct fyear:

gen fyear = cyear
replace fyear = cyear - 1 if fyrc < 6 & month < fyrc (I did not have fyr in the Dataset)

But what if the monthly return lays after fyr and fyr is bigger than 5?
Would fiscalyear be cyear + 1 in that case? Is e.g. fiscal year 2021 starting in July 2020 then?
In that case I would also add:
replace fyear = cyear + 1 if fyrc > 5 & month > fyrc

It would help me a lot if sb could clarify that

Thanks a lot!!

[Hemanshu Kumar]

Welcome to Statalist. Please do review the forum FAQ. Several bits are immediately relevant:

• as point #6 states, we very strongly prefer everyone use their real names.
• Please provide a data example using the dataex command, as outlined in #12.2
• Please use CODE delimiters when posting data or code, as mentioned in #12.3.

[Nick Cox]

I agree strongly with Hemanshu Kumar

Good answers are hardly possible except on those terms.