Exploring the value relevance of Intellectual Capital in the Italian listed firms

Purpose – The purpose of the paper is to investigate the value relevance of intellectual capital of the Italian listed firms.Design/methodology/approach – The paper uses the Ohlson model (1995), has an Italian focus, and draws on 360 firm-year observations of the publicly listed companies on the Italian Stock Exchange between the years 2006 at 2008. It is empirical study using Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) for the data analysis. The paper identifies the IC variables as the “other information variable” of the Ohlson model.Findings – The findings show that the fundamental variables of the Ohlson model (Book value and Earning) are positively related to the market value. On the contrary, the IC variables, which reflect the Human Capital, the Relation Capital, the Innovation Capital and the Process Capital, do not present a meaningful relation with the market value, except for the last one. In conclusion, our results imply that investors do not seem to be able to detect and incorporate the intellectual capital information as represented in the IC proxies chosen for the research into their business valuation process. Research limitations/implications - The motivations of the inconsistent results for the IC proxies could be linked of many possible reasons:1) the inadequacy of the proxies selected to identify the IC subcategories;2) the imperfect functioning of the Italian market.3) the low degree of awareness of the investor, that does not able to “read” the accounting information in a IC perspective. In future, the model could be tested by using different and more effective proxies for IC, in order to be sure to isolate the effect of the imperfect functioning of the reference financial market. Moreover, the research could be enlarged to other countries and to be enlarged to a more extended period of time, considering the impact of IAS/IFRS in the accounting data previous to the 2006. Originality/value - The major interest of the paper is that it represents one of the few studies that explicitly examined the value relevance of intellectual capital in investors’ business valuation. Nevertheless the results could be even more interesting if in the future the accounting normative will require the disclosure of the intellectual capital and its components in the financial statements. This will give raise to a unique data set that allow researchers to examine more effectively whether and how the stock market prices intellectual components.

Attraverso l'applicazione di tecniche di regressione multipla lo studio testa la value relevance del capitale intellettuale su un campione di società quotate sulla Borsa valori di Milano. Il modello teorico di riferimento è il modello di Ohlson.