TY  - JOUR
AU  - Bontempi,Maria Elena
AU  - Mairesse,Jacques
TI  - Intangible Capital and Productivity: An Exploration on a Panel of Italian Manufacturing Firms
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 14108
PY  - 2008
Y2  - June 2008
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w14108
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w14108.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Maria Elena Bontempi
University of Ferrara
E-Mail: mariaelena.bontempi@unibo.it

Jacques Mairesse
CREST-INSEE
15, Boulevard Gabriel PERI
92245 MALAKOFF CEDEX
FRANCE
Tel: 33-1-41-17-35-50
Fax: 33-1-41-17-76-34
E-Mail: mairesse@ensae.fr
AB  - 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.
ER  -