A New Perspective on the International Evidence Concerning the Book-Price Effect.

Finance theory implies equity returns should be positively related to financial leverage. However, a recent article decomposes the book-price ratio into financing and operating components and report a negative association between financial leverage and returns. We shed new light on this puzzle by examining a region in which previous research has established that firms’ financial leverage choices are motivated by factors other than maximizing shareholders’ wealth: we hypothesize that this must be reflected in both how financial leverage is priced and the book-price ratio. We show that the relationship between equity returns and financial leverage for stocks in our sample is indeed very different to the findings of previous research, and this is reflected in the decomposed elements of the book-price ratio. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]