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Abstract

Traditional accounting systems fail to adequately account for intellectual capital (IC) in a transparent manner. They usually ignore the increasing roles of intangible assets and knowledge and fail to account their real values in their calculations. There is an increasing need to correctly measure and capture the real value of intangible assets and knowledge in financial statements because todays return on intellectual capital employed becomes more important and the importance of financial capital in the determination of sustained profitability is strongly reduced. Since IC is a major part of firms total real capital, most of the firms are very interested to measure their IC values. Two important questions in IC literature are 1)how a firm’s IC value can be measured? 2)are there meaningful relationships between firms’ IC values and their share market prices? In this research, to answer the first question, we have used five simple calculation methods and then evaluated Iranian firms’ and industries’ IC values based on each method. To answer the second question, we have tested statistically our research main hypothesis that was a confirmation on the existance of a meaningful relationship between firms’ IC values with their shares market prices in the Tehran Stock Exchange (TSE). Results of empirical test, at confidence level %95, clearly confirms existing such a meaningful relationship in the TSE.

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