The study analyzes the relation between costs and values of public firms. The main purpose of this study is to analyze the effect of knowledge assets related costs on knowledge assets. The importance of knowledge asset is more increasing than before because of the free commercial transaction and knowledge sharing due to the internet appearance. Generally speaking, an investment is needed to acquire some results. It is same for knowledge assets. Similarly, the value of knowledge asset may come from knowledge assets related costs. If you invest more resources on knowledge asset related costs, you will be able to get some value of knowledge assets. So, this paper focus on the relation between knowledge assets costs and value using public data.
I classify the costs on Financial Statements into 3 sub categories, customer capital, human capital and structural capital and apply for the research model.
The basic research model consider 5 independent variables, customer capital costs per sales, human capital costs per sales, structural capital costs per sales, Sales growth and Operating income growth rates and dependent variable, Tobin’s q ratio. For some independent variables, time lag is considered. To remove the multicollinearity among independent variables, Almon’s time lag distribution model is applied. The samples consist of 15 groups and total numbers of samples are 94. The multiple regression test is performed during 1997 ~ 2001. Using SPSS 11.0 package, the multiple regression test is done and the results compares with established hypotheses.
The results of this study are as follows.
The customer, human, structural capital costs have positive effects on the knowledge assets values but not all estimated values are statistically significant. And the effects of time lags are different from sub capital. In customer capital, the effect on knowledge assets value is negative for current but positive for previous costs. In human capital, it is positive for current and previous period costs. Lastly, in structural capital, it is negative for current but positive for 3 variables in previous 3 periods.
In the analysis of the duration of the knowledge asset value, structural capital is longer than the other two, customer capital and human capital.