Since the late 1980's, with environmental changes around business world, there has emerged financial reporting that traditional accounting system did not reflect the value of firms.
Accordingly, nonfinancial information and intangible assets have beco...
Since the late 1980's, with environmental changes around business world, there has emerged financial reporting that traditional accounting system did not reflect the value of firms.
Accordingly, nonfinancial information and intangible assets have become more important, while KONRAD group, with Karl E. Sveivy's leadership, proposed theoretical framework on which intangible assets could be reported appropriately. Edvinsson and Malone classified intellectual capital as human capital, customer capital, and organizational capital.
In accounting studies, R&D costs, advertising costs, educational & training expenses belong in the category of capital. Out of these, R&D costs corresponds to organizational capital, advertising costs, to customer capital, and educational & training expenses, to human capital respectively.
The present study empirically tested the impact of the educational and training expenses on the firm performance. It is considered significantly important in the sense that this study applied panel analysis using SURE system (Seemingly Unrelated Regression Estimation).
The results of the study are summarized as below. First, educational & training expenses, which was set as independent variable, was found to have positively significant impact. Therefore it can be safely said that they display characteristics of intangible assets, and that they have positively significant impact on the firm performance which comprise gross profit to net sales and normal income to net sales.
Second, R & D costs, which was set as dependent variable, was found to have negatively significant impact on the firm performance in some cases.
Third, advertising costs, which was set as control variable, was found to have negatively significant impact on the firm performance in some cases as well.
In order to solve heteroscedasticity of cross sectional data and autocorrelation effect due to time lag, the present study applied SURE procedure in empirically testing the impact of intangible assets on the firm performance.
This empirical testing method did not use cross-sectional analysis, but rather panel analysis considering individual cross-sectional features as well as yearly features.
Previous studies, which used ALMON's model in order to reflect the time lag involved in R & D costs, has problems of reliability due to the constraint of cross-sectional data. This study is significant in that it used SURE procedure which is methodologically more improved than ALMON model.