The usefulness of earnings versus book value for predicting stock returns and cross corporate ownership in Japan

Using a sample of Japanese firms, this paper evaluates the usefulness of the two fundamental products of an accrual accounting system, namely accrual earnings and book value of equity for predicting stock returns. Our analysis shows that both earnings and book value for Japanese firms have the ability to provide for profitable trading strategies or improved portfolio decisions, and that relative to the trading strategy based on earnings or book value alone, the trading strategy based on a combination of both earnings and book value generates substantially higher returns for all cases. This suggests that book value (or earnings) captures certain aspects of equity values that are not captured by earnings (book value). Our multivariate regression results further indicate that the predictive ability of earnings is dominated by that of book value. Finally, it is found that the predictive ability of book value is sensitive to the degree of cross corporate ownership, while it is insensitive to the degree of real estate holding.