Intangibles from intangible capital work – their valuation and technological change (D5.3)

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the development of the valuation of intangible assets and examine how it varies over time and evaluate its impact on technical change and markups and hence on firm performance. We explore a new measure of intangible assets (IA) based on expenditures on innovative labor and the creation of innovation-biased technical change. The analysis is conducted for four countries, Finland, Norway, Slovenia and Denmark, using linked employer-employee datasets and the GLOBALINTO occupation-based approach for measuring intangible assets. All four countries show robust development of technical improvement over time that did not slow down or decline after financial crises. Intangibles and technical change have led to increases in contributions of both R&D and organizational labor. Markups have varied over time, but with an increasing trend in all countries.

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