Intangible Intensity

We develop a text-based measure of intangible investment intensity derived from firms’ 10-K filings, and offer a general methodology for semantic theme scoring (STS). Our approach further classifies disclosure text into knowledge, customer, and organization capital. Firms with high intangible intensity are smaller, younger, and invest heavily in R&D and human capital. The three subcomponents map cleanly to distinct economic firm types: knowledge-intensive firms are R&D-driven with high valuations and skilled labor; customer-intensive firms are mature, profitable, and commercially oriented; and organization-intensive firms are large, asset-heavy incumbents. Managerial expenditure descriptions thus provide informative signals about intangible investment, complementing financial statements in capturing corporate capital stocks.