This paper examines the extent to which the rise in U.S. market-to-book ratios over the period 1980-2000 is due to expenditures on R&D becoming more profitable versus simply becoming more prevalent. More profitable R&D increases the numerator of the market-to-book ratio, while the biased nature...

We study the economic importance of accounting information as defined by the value that a sophisticated investor can extract from publicly available financial statements when optimizing a portfolio of U.S. equities. Our approach applies the elegant new parametric portfolio policy method of...