Machine-readable price data transformed finance research from hand compilation to analysis

Evidence

CRSP’s tapes soon joined by other data sources, notably the “Compustat” tapes of accounting data sold by Standard & Poor’s-gave U.S. finance academics from the mid 1960s an advantage over their predecessors: easy access to massive volumes of data in a format that facilitated analysis. Even at the start of the 1960s, researchers such as the Chicago Ph.D. student Arnold B. Moore were still having to construct stock-price series by hand from runs of the Wall Street journal (Moore 1962, p. 47). Once the CRSP tapes became available, that tedious effort was no longer needed. — Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera, 309

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how did data availability itself shape the content of finance theory, beyond just enabling tests? This is a scaffolding step toward the performativity claim.
• XREF: connects to: Financialization includes automated high-frequency trading where computers execute most exchanges — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 71; The stock ticker’s real-time price data created the possibility of chartist technical analysis. — Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial…, 334