In the description of HW #3 you say that market cap should be readily available however I am not seeing it on Crsp merged database. I have found a variable called "Market Value" but I do not think this is what I want. If I cannot find the variable should I just multiply "common shares outstanding" by "closing annual price"? I am reluctant to do this though because you said to avoid using price data in our calculation.

When you say that you found a variable called "Market Value", what was the variable? Was it MKVALT? Was it MKVALTQ? Did you download some data and see if it matched Yahoo Finance? This is sort of how you figure these out. I looked at MKVALT and saw that it appears to quote in terms of $M, so I think this is what you want.