In 2010, Sirca and the University of New South Wales entered into an agreement to migrate the production of databases previously undertaken by the Australian Business School based Centre for Research in Finance to Sirca. This included the impressive Australian share price and price relative (SPPR) database.
SPPR is an historical record of share prices and calculated price relatives of all Australian listed and previously listed companies with fully paid shares.
For each company, the share price, dividends, adjustments for share issues and reconstructions, number of shares on issue and price relatives are held on a monthly basis. Pertinent company and trading information is also supplied. The SPPR covers the period from December 1973 to December 2010. It includes earlier price relatives for a smaller subset of companies, some back as far as 1958.
The SPPR is updated annually, at present updates are sent to subscribers on a DVD. New subscribers receive the full history, as well as ongoing updates. Sirca is obviously planning to make this database avialable on-line as an option on the Sirca product portal; at present access to SPPR is not included as part of standard Sirca membership.
Further details about the database can be accessed here.
SPPR is an important resource which enables researchers to factor historical realities into their work thus making point-in-time databases which tend to reflect the way a market was structured and constituted on a specific date, much more valuable and accessible for their research. SPPR therefore enables researchers to use historical records as part of contemporary research by using the database’s persistent identifiers, thus allowing users to move backwards and forwards through entity changes. This obviously helps address some of the usual concerns of data bias caused by the omission of data pertaining to delisted entities.
An increasing number of universities also rely on the entity tracking part of SPPR by making this the back bone to the way they link data pertaining to individual active and delisted companies, to data sourced from other databases.
