Intellectual capital impact on firm value – An integrated reporting approach for Johannesburg Stock Exchange listed companies

The measurement and reporting of the impact of intellectual capital on firm value has remained an elusive empirical and practitioner question. The advent of Integrated Reporting (IR) was initially considered as presenting an opportunity for firms to measure and report on the contribution of non-financial capitals towards firm value creation. However, the IR framework fell short of providing a holistic solution as it lacked a measurement tool that could be used by IR report preparers, analysts and other users of corporate reports. Intellectual capital is one of the five non-financial capitals identified in the IR framework. This study, focusing on intellectual capital, offers a measurement solution using regression modelling. Adopting the intellectual capital theory lens, this study decomposed intellectual capital into the Value-Added Intellectual Coefficient (VAIC) that was used in the regression model. Using VAIC as an independent variable and company value as the dependent variable, the results of the study indicated that Intellectual capital has a statistically significant relationship to firm value. The dominant proxy for firm value was the market share price while EVA, TobinQ and share price at book value were used to check the robustness of the former. The dummy variable for the model was COVID-19.