The impact of intangible assets on firm value: empirical evidence from the European manufacturing sector

This paper investigates the impact of intangible assets (IAs) on firm value (FRV) using a panel of 1,249 European manufacturing firms over the period 2010–2022, with data from the Osiris database. Applying quantile regression, the results indicate that IAs have a consistently positive but heterogeneous influence across the FRV distribution. The magnitude of the impact increases toward the upper quantiles, suggesting that firms with higher market valuations benefit more from their investments in IAs due to greater capabilities to convert them into recognised value. Robustness checks, including the separate examination of goodwill, analysis based on a sub-sample of firms from Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) compared to the rest of the sample, lagged IAs and two alternative specifications of the dependent variable, confirm the stability of the findings and indicate that the extent to which IAs are reflected in FRV may depend on the institutional and market environment. Overall, the findings contribute to the literature by showing that the impact of IAs on FV is heterogeneous and depends on firms’ position within the FRV distribution.