Intangible Assets and Profitability in the Italian Banking Industry: Which Relationship?

Purpose of this paper is to value the role of the human capital in the profitability production within the Italian Mutual Bank (Bcc); to achieve this, we provide for the carrying out of an analysis on a sample of 209 of the above-mentioned banks using the Pulic’s VAICTM methodology (1998), in a five-year period of time (2006-2010).Obviously, we will use what the specialized literature gives us, which offers interesting and in-depth hints about the intellectual capital, but only referred to the listed medium-large banks; as far as we know there are no analysis and assessments over the local banks which, apart from their dimension, have a more and more nerve role in the financing of the real economy. The results of our analysis show clearly how the human capital has a meaningful role on the banks’ profitability, especially those which let the active presence in the territory be a setting value of their own business mission. At a territorial level, the Bcc of the South show steadier marginal effects than their sister companies of the North. In a historical period characterized by evident phenomena of credit crunch put into action by the great banks on the real economy, the banks’ local model and centrality of the human capital which characterize them still represents a value on which set up the sustain and the revival of the economy in the territory.