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This paper aims to study the relationship between intellectual capital disclosures (ICDs) and the relative importance of intangible assets as company value drivers.

Annual reports of Swedish, British and Danish firms are analysed to measure the extent of ICD. The level of intellectual capital (IC) in firms, measured with proxies for the categories of human, structural and relational capital.

As to the components of IC, the empirical results indicate that there is a strong significant positive relationship between (the level of) structural capital possession of a firm and the firm's ICD.

This suggests that firms with a relatively high level of structural capital, disclose more information on IC in the annual report. The study found no such significant association between human and relational capital in firms and ICD regarding these items. Firms might have a transparency drawback in addressing these issues in the reports when these IC categories are relatively of greater importance for firms.

The paper provides evidence for the argument that firms focus their ICD on those IC elements that are most relevant for the company's value creation process.

The purpose of this paper is to examine determinants of the decision to disclose intellectual capital in annual reports.

The paper derives theoretical predictions from the previous literature and bases the study on archival data with a sample of 125 publicly listed Australian firms. The authors perform a content analysis of annual reports and complement the data with quantitative data from the sample firms.

The paper finds that industry type plays a key role as a determinant for the disclosure of intellectual property in annual reports. In addition, firm size is another determinant for intellectual disclosure of firms. In contrast with earlier studies and theoretical predictions of voluntary disclosure, however, the paper does not find any relationship between the level of information asymmetry and intellectual capital disclosure.

One limitation refers to the content analysis. Analyzing the annual reports based on the specified list of IC‐related terms may not provide the whole picture as well as the IC disclosure practices. Despite these limitations, the study helps to understand better in general what kind of firms actually disclose information on intellectual capital.

In contrast with earlier studies the study uses significantly more observations, which makes the results more reliable and generalizable. Of further significance is the finding that information asymmetry – one of the main problems between investors and firms – is not driving the decision of firms to disclose information on intellectual capital.

The purpose of this paper is to link empirically the value of intellectual capital and intellectual property to firm performance.

Survey data from managers in the (German) pharmaceutical industry is used to conduct a regression analysis focusing on the correlation between human, structural and relational capital, intellectual property and firm performance.

The results of the study show that including intellectual property in models linking intellectual capital to firm performance enhances the statistical validity of such models and their relevance for management.

Intellectual capital is an important source of an organization's economic wealth and is therefore to be taken into serious consideration when formulating the firm's strategy. This strategy formulation process can be enhanced by fully integrating intellectual property and intellectual capital into management models, as shown in this paper.

This empirical paper builds on and extends the Bontis research on the relationship between intellectual capital and firm performance. Contrary to Bontis the authors include intellectual property into the intellectual capital framework and focus on the role of intellectual property in the relationship between intellectual capital and firm performance.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the extent of intellectual capital (IC) disclosure on the UK biotechnology initial public offering (IPO) prospectuses. The study is based on companies going public on the London Stock Exchange (LSE) and the London Alternative Investment Market (AIM) over the period 2005‐2007.

The extent of IC disclosure is collected and measured by using the IC disclosure index and the framework proposed by Bukh et al. The differences in the level of IC disclosure are analysed by modelling some firm‐specific determinants such as size, maturity, age and independence of the board.

It is shown that primary listing companies on the LSE disclose more IC information than those on the London AIM. Maturity and independence of the board are associated with IC disclosure, while size and age are not related, showing the importance of corporate communication as a signal of credibility to possible investors at IPO stage.

The main contribution of the paper is to analyse IC disclosure in the UK biotechnology IPO prospectuses. Previous literature does not focus on this reporting genre as an important corporate communication tool, as most research investigates IC disclosure only in annual reports and country regulation settings.

This paper replicates and extends the Bontis research on intellectual capital (IC) disclosures in Canadian companies and also elaborates on the Beaulieu et al. research on disclosures by Swedish firms.

The paper studies IC disclosures by French CAC‐40, Dutch AEX and German XETRA‐DAX publicly‐listed companies for the years 2000 and 2001. The paper also discusses country‐specific arguments in favour of and against voluntary disclosure by such companies and searches both the annual reports and financial statements for IC hits.

Applying the Gray‐scale to categorise countries, the paper finds not only that voluntary IC disclosure significantly differs between these countries, but also that this difference can be explained by country‐specific regulation and auditor conservatism.

The paper only studies Dutch, French and German IC disclosures in annual reports and financial statements. These three countries are European Union member states but “differ” significantly from one another. The differences discussed in this paper, however, are by no means exhaustive, nor do they picture the “European situation” in full.

The paper recognises that the intangible nature of IC creates tension with current country‐specific legislation and strongly calls for convergence of applicable accounting standards and practices because of the increasing importance of IC and because of the improvement of corporate governance and policy making.

The paper not only extends (or fine‐tunes) previous research, but also links with the literature that discusses the consequences of country‐specific characteristics for accounting standards and practices.