The Impact of Intangible Assets on the Market Value of Companies: Cross-Sector Evidence

Abstract

The impact of corporate intangibles on a company’s market value has been a widely debated topic. A large body of literature has separately examined the industry’s effect- or firm-specific attributes, such as industry type, company size, company age, or indebtedness and profitability, on the motivation to disclose information on intangible assets, but without considering a comprehensive view. This paper examines the role intangible assets play in a firm’s market valuation besides other firm-specific characteristics. The reducted dataset we use in this study comprises 250 publicly traded companies operating in four different business sectors in France, Germany, and Switzerland for the ten years from 2009 to 2018. Based on the panel data regression models, the study provides an extension of previous knowledge about the effect intangible assets may have on the investors’ view of a company’s value, where the value added of this paper is the empirical evidence of a possible link between the intangible assets’ disclosure and the market value of German, French, and Swiss enterprises. The importance of our contribution lies in a comparative analysis carried out to reveal substantial differences in the impact of intangible assets and innovation activity on the market value firms in three European countries and across four industry sectors. Although the results show the positive impact of intangible assets on the companies’ market value, we suggest that investors still assess companies based on their profitability rather than considering the information on intangible assets the enterprises disclose in their financial statements.