ACHIEVING COMPARABILITY OF UNITED-STATES AND JAPANESE FINANCIAL STATEMENT DATA

This paper develops a methodology for restating Japanese and U.S. financial statement data at the firm level to a comparable reporting basis. We apply the procedure to a sample of Japanese and U.S. firms for fiscal years 1985 through 1988. Previous studies which have investigated the disparity between U.S. and Japanese price-earnings ratios (PERs) have concluded that different accounting principles explain between one-half and virtually all of the difference between U.S. and Japanese PERs. In contrast, our results indicate that adjusting for different accounting principles explains very little of the difference in PERs.