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 characteristics are likely to have substantial impact on the levels of agency costs of debt (asset-substitution and under-investment problems) and equity (hidden action and hidden information problems), information asymmetry levels between investors and managers, transaction costs of debt and equity, and non-debt tax shields. The severity of these effects is likely to influence the maximisation of managers, shareholders and debt holders' utility functions, which show different rewards, diversification levels, risk preferences and business expertise. Also, it seems likely that the severity of those effects varies across categories of intangible assets.