Decomposition of book-to-market and the cross-section of returns for Chinese shares

In this paper, we show that the book-to-market decomposition described in Fama-French (2008) significantly improves the predictive power of the estimation for an important emerging market, viz, Chinese shares. Second, we show that this improvement comes mainly from the change in book equity and not from the change in price. The predictive power of the change in book equity is most pronounced for large stocks, for stocks listed on Shenzhen Exchange, for stocks with low book-to-market (or growth stocks), and for Class B shares. Net Share Issue and Momentum add no explanatory power to the predictive regressions.