Japanese stock returns are even more closely related to their book-to-market ratios than are their U.S. counterparts, and thus provide a good setting for testing whether the return premia associated with these characteristics arise because the characteristics are proxies for covariance with...

Firm size and book-to-market ratios are both highly correlated with the returns of common stocks. Fama and French (1993) have argued that the association between these firm characteristics and their stock returns arises because size and book-to-market ratios are proxies for non-diversifiable...

We decompose stock returns into components attributable to tangible and intangible information. A firm's tangible return is the component of its return attributable to fundamental accounting-performance information, and its intangible return is the component which is orthogonal to this...