The impact of intellectual capital on firm productivity: a consideration of global crises

Productivity enhances corporate competitiveness and intellectual capital (IC) plays a significant role in productivity but previous studies have paid little attention to the IC role. This paper, hence, investigates investment in IC and analyses how IC enhances firm productivity with a consideration of global crises. Employing the generalized methods of moments (GMM) approach and panel data from 687 listed firms in Vietnam over the period 2007–2022, our findings show that IC improves productivity overall, though IC components vary in effectiveness. Our analysis highlights different impacts of IC across industries and underlines the effect of global crises on productivity.