The Impact of Intellectual Capital on the Financial Performance of Listed Companies in Tehran Stock Exchange

In the age of knowledge-based economy, an organization uses two distinguished resources for value creation and profit making: material or tangible resources and intellectual or invisible resources. In fact, it is claimed that intellectual capital can explain better the material and physical capital and a company’s performance financial indices. Intellectual capital provides a new complete model for observing organizations’ real value and by using it; a company’s future value can be calculated. The objective of the present study is to investigate the influence of intellectual capital on financial performance of the listed companies in Tehran Stock Exchange. In order to assess the intellectual capital, the value added intellectual capital coefficient developed by Palyk was used, which is one of the most important and valuable methods of assessing intellectual capital. In the present study, the influence of intellectual capital indices (efficiency of human, structural and physical capitals) on financial performance (earnings per share and the efficiency of assets) for 70 companies during the years 2004 to 2007 was investigated using the panel data regression. Be reviewing the literature, four hypotheses were proposed. The results obtained from testing the hypotheses showed that intellectual capital has positive and significant influence on earnings per share and the efficiency of assets. The results of regression models show that intellectual capital has positive and significant influence on earnings per share and the efficiency of assets. Structural capital like other components of intellectual capital also has significant and positive on the efficiency of assets. The results also indicate that the negative influence of structural capital on earnings per share, however, because this influence is not significant enough, it can be neglected. The results of the approach of panel data are indicative of the significant influence of physical capital on earnings per share and the efficacy of assets. Therefore, increase in physical capital results in improving the financial performance of the studies companies.