The paper examines the size and productivity of total intangible capital relative to total tangible capital for a large panel of Italian Manufacturing firms. In the analysis, we decompose total intangibles in two different ways: in intangibles expensed in firms' current accounts (as usually considered in empirical studies) versus intangible capitalized in firms' balance sheets (usually not considered); and in "intellectual capital" (i.e. R&D expenditures, and patenting and related costs) versus "customer capital" (i.e., advertising expenditure, and trademarks and related costs). We systematically assess the robustness of our results by using different specifications of the production functions implying different elasticities of substitution between tangible and intangible capital, and comparing different panel data estimates. Our results underscore that firms' accounting information on intangible investments is genuinely informative, showing that intangible capital and its different components are at least as productive as tangible capital.
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Paper provided by National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc in its series NBER Working Papers with number
14108.
Length: Date of creation: Jun 2008 Date of revision: Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:14108
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Find related papers by JEL classification: C23 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Single Equation Models; Single Variables - - - Models with Panel Data C52 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Econometric Modeling - - - Model Evaluation and Testing D24 - Microeconomics - - Production and Organizations - - - Production; Capital and Total Factor Productivity; Capacity
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