The LSE Directory / Fundamental data
CRSP (Center for Research in Security Prices) is a historical financial market data and index provider whose flagship CRSP US Stock Databases supply daily and monthly prices, returns, corporate actions, shares outstanding and delisting records on tens of thousands of active and inactive US securities listed on NYSE, NYSE American, NASDAQ, NYSE Arca and Cboe BZX, with coverage extending back to December 1925. Alongside stock data it maintains the CRSP Market Indexes, the CRSP US Treasury and Inflation Series, the CRSP Survivor-Bias-Free US Mutual Fund Database, the CRSP/Compustat Merged Database and the CRSP/Ziman Real Estate Database, distributed through WRDS, Snowflake Marketplace, MOVEit and CHASS. CRSP differentiates itself on data lineage rather than breadth: its proprietary PERMNO and PERMCO identifiers track a security and its issuing company through name changes, mergers, spin offs and delistings, giving researchers a survivorship-bias-free, longitudinally consistent record that off-the-shelf ticker-based feeds do not provide. Its customer base is concentrated among academic researchers, asset managers, mutual fund and ETF providers, index licensees and policymakers who need backtestable, methodologically documented history rather than real-time market data; CRSP does not offer live pricing, execution or brokerage services. CRSP was established in March 1960 at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business by professors James H. Lorie and Lawrence Fisher, funded by an initial grant from Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner and Smith, to measure the long-run rate of return on US common stocks. Its original NYSE master file, completed in 1964, became the first comprehensive market database of its kind and underpinned research including the efficient markets hypothesis developed by Booth professor Eugene Fama, who shared the 2013 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. By the time of its 2025 to 2026 sale, CRSP served more than 600 institutional subscribers across 35 countries, and its CRSP Market Indexes benchmarked over 3 trillion US dollars in assets, underlying funds such as the Vanguard Total Stock Market Index Fund and Vanguard Mid-Cap Index Fund. The University of Chicago agreed to sell CRSP to Morningstar for 375 million US dollars, in a deal announced 23 September 2025 and completed 2 February 2026. Morningstar has since rebranded the CRSP Market Indexes as Morningstar Indexes and moved the research data product pages to its own indexes.morningstar.com site, while continuing to operate the CRSP research databases and distribution channels under the CRSP name.
