Intangible Intensity

Andrea Eisfeldt, Barney Hartman-Glaser, Edward T. Kim and Ki Beom Lee

No 34882, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: We develop a text-based measure of intangible investment intensity derived from firms’ 10-K filings, and offer a general methodology for semantic theme scoring (STS). Our approach further classifies disclosure text into knowledge, customer, and organization capital. Firms with high intangible intensity are smaller, younger, and invest heavily in R&D and human capital. The three subcomponents map cleanly to distinct economic firm types: knowledge-intensive firms are R&D-driven with high valuations and skilled labor; customer-intensive firms are mature, profitable, and commercially oriented; and organization-intensive firms are large, asset-heavy incumbents. Managerial expenditure descriptions thus provide informative signals about intangible investment, complementing financial statements in capturing corporate capital stocks.

JEL-codes: A0 C0 E0 E01 G0 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-acc, nep-bec and nep-knm
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