(3) Correcting Japanese accounting statements for unmeasured returns to land has a significantly more important effect: the most conservative correction we attempt raises the implied Japanese return to capital to parity with the United States during the mid-1980's

This paper uses financial statement data for large samples of U.S. and Japanese nonfinancial corporations to estimate the return to capital in each country for the period 1967-83. Interpreting these as measures of the cost of capital, we find that the before-tax cost of corporate capital was...