Intangible Assets and Financial Management Decisions on the Example of WSE Companies

Intangible Assets

Intangible assets are a very economically significant asset class yet are largely excluded by accounting conventions from corporate balance sheets. Ownership (or control) of intangible assets can allow firms to differentiate their offerings to customers and establish some degree of competitive advantage. However, intangibles do not, apart from a few cases of licensing, generate value on their o...

The Impact of Intangible Assets on Financial and Governance Policies: a Literature Review

This article provides a literature review about the impact of the intangible assets on the design of corporate financial and governance policies. Intangible assets show a set of characteristicsnamely, high levels of risk and uncertainty, firm-specificity, human capital intensity, low observability and long-term naturethat make them markedly distinct from other categories of assets. These charac...

Research and Development, Intangible Assets and the Performance of Large Australian Companies

Tobin’s q and Intangible Assets

In a recent paper Laitner & Stolyarov (2003) assert that measured Tobin’s q has usually been well above 1, and use this to back up their conclusion that there are significant quantities of unrecorded intangible assets. This key feature of q turns out however to be entirely due to errors and omissions in the authors’ calculations. The corrected q series turns out to be usually well below unity.

Intangible assets and capital structure

Tangible assets, many of which can be easily collateralized, support debt. Accordingly, the amount of tangible assets is well-established as a principal driver of leverage. As investing is shifting more and more from tangible to intangible assets, it becomes crucial to understand to what extent intangible assets support debt. Analyzing this question empirically has been largely unfeasible due t...