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The paper aims to evaluate 141 publicly traded US firms in the traditional sectors of the economy to assess intellectual capital disclosure levels.

Content analysis was conducted using 10‐K annual reports.

It was found that traditional sector companies had a mean disclosure of intellectual capital of 24.227 in fiscal year 2000 and 27.709 in fiscal year 2004 (t=3.68, df = 140, p=0.01). This supported the authors hypothesis that traditional sector companies would show an increase in the level of intellectual capital disclosure in 2004 as compared to 2000. Within the total sample, 78 companies increased their intellectual capital disclosure in fiscal year 2004 as compared to fiscal year 2000 (z=−3.4756, p=0.01).

While the authors generated 121 phrases to tap the intellectual capital construct, there may be other word combinations given the differences in vocabulary between academia and the corporate world.

These findings are particularly noteworthy because traditional sector companies are capital intensive and are reliant upon fixed assets which are reported on the balance sheet. This study suggests that even managers in the traditional sectors of the US economy are coming to recognize the growing importance of intellectual capital.

This is the only longitudinal study to focus on intellectual capital disclosure of traditional firms in the USA, and this research was conducted over the time that the Financial Accounting Standards Board called for increased disclosure of intangible assets.

The purpose of this study is to compare the level of intellectual capital disclosure (ICD) of firms in the high technology and traditional sectors of the economy.

In order to provide a framework to evaluate the level of disclosure of the different categories of intellectual capital (IC), the author develops an IC model based on an integration of the resource‐based view (RBV) of the firm, the knowledge management, and IC literature. The model is called the RBV IC model. Content analysis was conducted using the SEC Form 10‐K annual reports of 143 high‐technology companies (HTCs) and 141 traditional sector companies (TSCs) US publicly traded firms for fiscal year 2000 and 2004. The components of IC as delineated in the RBV IC model are the subject of the analysis with the frequency of disclosure being used as the measure of disclosure.

HTCs had a higher frequency of disclosure of customer capital, organizational capital, human capital, and intellectual property than TSCs. Regarding supplier capital, the data were inconclusive. HTCs had an overall higher level of ICD than TSCs both in fiscal years 2000 and 2004.

The frequency of the use of words or phrases alone is used as the measure of the level of ICD.

This is the first study to compare the level of ICD of high tech and traditional sector US publicly traded companies. The results have significant implications for setting standards of disclosure in that it supports the argument that high‐tech companies may be providing higher levels of ICD because of the failure (actual or perceived) of the traditional accounting model to provide value relevant information about a company's IC.