where Priceit is the price per share of firm i at the end of period t, BVPSit is the book value
per share of firm i at the end of period t, and REit is the residual earnings per share of firm i
for year t + k.
The coefficient a1 would have an expected value of 1.0 while the coefficients a2 to a4
would have expected values of (1 + r) ÿ t
. Finally, the expected value of coefficient ak
would be (1/r)*(1 + r) ÿ T
.
3 Residual earnings horizons will differ cross-sectionally; therefore,
parsimonious cross-sectional representations of Equation (1) will have only a few
terms. For example Frankel and Lee (1999) use T = 2 because analysts' forecasts used to
predict future residual earnings were only available for 2 years.
Our first tests are concerned with the incremental explanatory power of book value and
residual earnings. As in Collins et al. (1997) we compare the results of three regression
equations to address the question of relative and incremental explanatory power. Equation
(2) below provides the most parsimonious empirical specification of the residual earnings