Empirical evidence on measurement of intangible assets in European companies

This paper empirically investigates applied approaches for estimating the value of intangible assets published in recent years. Firms compete with each other and their business ideas are no more based only on ownership of tangible assets but on applying knowledge that helps them to generate above the average profits. Intangible assets rise in their importance, contribute to economic growth and became a significant factor in increasing firm's profitability. For the reason of their intangibility, we have no satisfactory data, which allow us to manage these assets effectively. Therefore, a lot of methods for estimating the value of intangible assets have been developed. The objective of our paper is to compare three main approaches, which were used as intangible intensity indicators in last five years. We apply them on a sample of data of European companies from database Amadeus. We show that for European firms with increasing ROTA rank measure, the value of R&D expenses and disclosed intangible assets increase as well.