Incremental Explanatory Power of Book Value and Earnings Per Share
Collins et al. (1997) examine the incremental explanatory power of book value and
earnings across a 41-year time period (1953±1993) for US firms. They find a decline in the ability of earnings to explain market prices over this period. But the explanatory
power of book values increases such that total explanatory power is actually higher in
more recent periods. Average adjusted R2 for a model regressing BVPS and EPS on
stock price for the first 10 years (1953±1962) was .50 increasing to .69 for their most
recent 10-year period (1984±1993). Collins et al. (1997) investigated possible reasons
for these changes. They find the reduced explanatory power of earnings is explained
by an increase in the incidence of one-time items and reported losses as well as a
decrease in the size of firms in the sample.
King and Langli (1998) examine a 15-year period (1982±1996) for Germany, Norway,
and the UK. They find that for Germany the incremental explanatory power of book value
increases significantly while that for EPS decreases. There is no significant change in their
common information. For Norway, there is no significant change in the incremental
explanatory power of book value or EPS over time. While for the UK, the incremental
explanatory power of book value increases and the incremental explanatory power of EPS
is unchanged over the time period.
Harris et al. (1994) also examine the separate explanatory power of book value and of
earnings using simple regressions with only one variable. They do not report the test
statistics. However, they say that while the explanatory power of EPS in Germany is
approximately equal to that in the US, the explanatory power of book value is much lower.
This contrasts sharply to the King and Langli (1998) results for a longer time period. The
Harris et al. (1994) results are not, however, tests of incremental explanatory power since
the simple regressions use only one variable.
This study extends the evidence summarized above. We examine the value relevance of
accounting numbers for companies in Asian countries. Prior financial reporting research in
English language journals has been limited.