The Impact Of Intellectual Capital On Companies’ Performance: Evidence From Emerging Markets

Abstract

The current study is devoted to the investigation of the impact of intellectual capital on the company’s performance with the evidence from the BRICS group. Due to its unobservable and intangible nature, intellectual capital (IC) has a number of proxies. In this paper IC is approximated by a new method, proposed by Sydler et al. (2014) as well as by more traditional VAIC approach. According to Zeghal and Maaloul’s (2010) approach, company’s performance is segmented into three dimensions: financial, economic and stock market performance. Applying econometric analysis it is found that IC has a positive and significant impact on the performance of a firm. Furthermore, IC has a positive influence on operational margin and it reduced the cost of equity for IC intensive companies. Comparing the two proxies, it was revealed that Sydler’s proxy is more relevant for stock market analysis since it directly estimates the volume of IC of a firm, while VAIC is a relative scale less measure of efficiency of the IC employment and is more closely related to the company’s efficiency rates, such as operational margin. The obtained results suggest that IC intensive firms on emerging markets invest mostly in improving its operational efficiency and reducing operational and competition risk.