How Significant are the Differences in Financial Data Provided by Key Data Sources? A Comparison of XBRL, Compustat, Yahoo! Finance, and Google Finance
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT We compare the financial statement data (excluding footnotes) reported by 105 randomly selected firms in their 10-K filings with data contained in XBRL filings and data reported by three data aggregators/distributors: Compustat, Google Finance, and Yahoo! Finance. We find that 48 percent to 63.2 percent of the 10-K financial statement items available in XBRL filings are not available from the aggregators/distributors. However, aggregator/distributor-provided data contain many financial items that are not in the official 10-K or XBRL filings but could be useful to users. For items included both in XBRL and by aggregators/distributors, all but 0.01 percent of the XBRL data amounts agree with the 10-K filings, whereas 6.5 percent to 7.7 percent of the amounts provided by aggregators/distributors do not, depending on the aggregator/distributor. Most differences are material, and the differences in items used in bankruptcy prediction and earnings quality models result in significant differences in the model results.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it