Valuation of Japanese Corporations during the 1980s: evidence from an accounting dataset

This paper applies the framework of McGrattan and Prescott (2005) to the Japanese economy using an accounting dataset. Restricting our attention to the steady growth path in the 1980s, we show that the estimated value of intangible capital in Japan is enormous compared to the U.S. and the U.K. cases. Interestingly, it is also found that when we consider the sub-period of 1987--1989, the so-called bubble period, the price-to-book-value ratio is quite close to one. This finding might imply that the stock price surge during the bubble period was not actually a bubble.