but firms in Taiwan do neither. This means that book values in the Philippines will reflect
market values of assets more closely than in Taiwan. Therefore, we expect the explanatory
power of book value will be greater for Philippine firms than for Taiwanese firms. As
another example, only Indonesian and Malaysian firms capitalize leases and R&D
expenditures and use the equity method for affiliated companies. These are less
conservative accounting practices than alternatives used in other counties.
We find accounting in Korea and Taiwan to be least faithful to clean surplus
accounting. Korea does not capitalize goodwill and asset revaluations are amortized to
equity according to tax law. Taiwan does not capitalize goodwill nor allow asset
revaluations. Korea is also the only country not to use the equity method for affiliated
companies. Thus, the earnings of Korean firms do not include the earnings of affiliated
firms. Philippine firms, however, amortize both goodwill and asset revaluations to income.
Recall that violations of clean surplus accounting occur when income does not reflect
changes in equity value. Thus, violations of clean surplus bias empirical calculations of
residual earnings. Therefore, we expect the explanatory power of residual earnings will be
highest for Philippine firms and least for Korean and Taiwan firms.
Overall, our results show significant differences across countries in the value relevance
of accounting earnings and book values. Explanatory power over all firm-years ranges
from R2 = .17 in Taiwan to R2 = .68 for Korea. The incremental explanatory power of book
value per share (BVPS) and residual earnings per share (REPS) is similarly diverse.
Incremental explanatory power of BVPS over all firm-years ranges from 7.2 percent
(Taiwan) to 65.3 percent (Philippines). For REPS, the incremental explanatory power over
all firm-years ranges from 1.4 percent (Korea) to 13.2 percent (Thailand).
Generally, we find differences in accounting appear to be related to differences in value
relevance. We find that the explanatory power of book value is highest in the Philippines
and lowest in Taiwan. This is consistent with our expectations based on the accounting
differences in the two countries. Indonesia and Malaysia have accounting systems that are
less conservative than other countries. However, we find the incremental explanatory
power of book value does not stand out as high in Indonesia or in Malaysia. This result is
only partly consistent with our expectations. We also expected that the relative explanatory
power of residual earnings would be high in the Philippines and low in Korea and Taiwan,
and the results support this prediction. Our comparisons across countries should be viewed
with caution because the number of years of data available ranges from only 2 years for the
Philippines to 10 years for Malaysia.
The next section of the article briefly reviews related research and this is followed by
the section discussing accounting differences in the six Asian countries. This is followed
by the description of the sample and development the study design. The section presenting
the analysis of our data and reporting the results of our tests follows. A final section
summarizes our findings.