LONG TERM PERFORMANCE OF VALUE VS. GROWTH STOCKS: EVIDENCE FROM INTERNATIONAL MARKETS Zugang Liu, Pennsylvania State University Hazleton, USA Jia Wang, Rowan University, Glassboro, NJ, USA ABSTRACT This paper studies the long-term risk and return characteristics of value stocks versus growth stocks for three international markets: Asia, Scandinavia, and Europe. We focus on the downside of returns and use Value at Risk as our risk measure. We find that value stocks outperform growth stocks in terms of both risks and returns across all time horizons for all three markets. We further conduct cross country analysis. Interestingly, we find that there is some risk and return trade off in short term investment horizon across the three countries. When investment horizon lengthens, Scandinavian market has the best performance in both risks and returns for both value and growth indexes. Keywords: Value, Growth, Risk, Time Horizon 1. INTRODUCTION

Value or growth? This is an age old debate in the investment world. Value style stock commonly refers to a stock that is undervalued relative to its fundamentals (i.e. dividends, earnings, sales, etc) and often has a low market to book ratio, a high dividend yield or a low P/E ratio. Growth style stocks are often shares from companies that are expected to grow at a higher than average rate and such stocks often have high market to book ratios, low dividend yields or high P/E ratios. Which one is more profitable? Basu (1977), among others, reports that value portfolios generate higher average returns than growth portfolios. Fama and French (1992) find that value stocks outperform growth stocks after controlling for market risk and size. So, is it a market anomaly or are value stocks riskier than growth stocks? Chen and Zhang (1998) argue that value stocks are riskier because they are often related to financially distressed firms.