growth stability, and capital expenditures and advertising expenses intensity, in addition to
traditional profitability signals.
Our empirical results indicate that both firms with higher composite score (either
VSCORE or GSCORE earn higher one-year and two-year market-adjusted buy-and-hold
returns that do firms with lower composite score without additional risk and that a zeroinvestment
portfolio of longing high score stocks and shorting low score stocks earn
significant positive market-adjusted returns. Specifically, a zero-investment portfolio based
on VSCORE (GSCORE) earns one-year and two-year ahead market-adjusted returns of
11.98% (14.94%) and 31.14% (30.67%), respectively. This suggests that historical
accounting information can be used to predict future stock returns