The study investigates the relationship between intellectual capital and share prices on the Nasdaq OMXS30 companies between 2001 and 2010. This, by using content analysis to score the companies’ disclosure of intellectual capital and linear regression to test for a relationship with the corresponding share prices.
We find a significant positive relationship between Price and Intellectual capital only for one of its subcategories: Internal Capital. The other two, Human Capital and External Capital, were both negatively correlated, explaining why we could not see a relationship between our total Intellectual capital score and price.
Apart from this, we see that the average IC disclosure increased significantly during our researched time period and that IC disclosure in knowledge-intensive companies is statistically higher than for capital-intensive companies when it comes to External Capital and Human Capital. For Internal Capital, as well as for Total intellectual capital disclosure, we could not see any difference.
Source: Umeå University
Author: Andersson, Mikael | Wiklund, Tobias