In latter years there has been a discussion about the increasing importance of intangible assets and how to incorporate this fact into strategies, accounting and valuation. The “Internet-bubble” is a recent event that drew much attention to intangible assets, and was an indicator of how complex it can be to value assets in general and intangible information in particular. Legislators recently addressed this issue by introducing IFRS3, which led to an update of IAS38, which in turn revised the methods for handling intangible assets. A specific intangible asset that has caused much debate is research and development (R&D), since it is commonly not allowed to be realized as an asset, which could cause implications concerning analysis and valuation.
Several studies have investigated the value-relevance of intangible assets, both realized and non-realized, and show that they have a value-relevance for the market value of companies. Other studies show that investors incorporate R&D to a certain degree in their valuation and therefore they argue that it should be realized as an asset rather than burden the income statement. We test for the value-relevance of realized intangible assets on the Stockholm Stock Exchange during the time-period of 1997-2005, which is a time-period that is burdened by a number of large fluctuations. We perform the tests both concerning the level of market value and also the change in market value (return). The essential part of these tests revolves around a value-relevance model in part similar to that of Barth et al. (1999), with which we build our analysis. We also examine if there is a relation between companies P/E-ratios, M/B-ratios and R&D expenses, since the underlying theoretical framework indicates that there is a difference in comparison to the market as a whole.
We find that realized intangible assets have a value-relevance for the level of market value and that they contribute to determining the market value. However, the incremental development in R2 when adding intangible assets into the model is relatively small, which indicates that even if there is a value-relevance the parameter only “explains” a relatively small portion of the market value. We also show that the return has no statistically significant connection to the change in realized intangible assets, which could be an effect of the rather large fluctuations in the market value during our time-period specifically concerning IT-companies. Finally we show that there is a difference in valuation-ratios like P/E and M/B, for companies with R&D in comparison to the market a...
