Hurdles for the Voluntary Disclosure of Information on Intangibles - Empirical Results for "New Economy" Industries

The importance of intangible assets like brands, customer relationships, knowledge or organisational capabilities is increasing in most western economies. Recent concepts like knowledge management or intellectual capital underline the growing importance of these "soft" production factors. The financial as well as the managerial accounting are still focusing on "hard" production factors, especially the production area with their typically physical and tangible assets and the finance and investment area with financial assets. This paper is focusing on possibilities and limits of reporting on intangible resources seen from the companies point of view. We examined 343 German listed corporations of the German C-DAX indices for industries where intangible resources play a significant role for the business models of the companies (Pharmaceuticals & Health, Software, Technology, Media and Telecommunications).Using a pre-tested questionnaire the sample finally consits of 54 companies (response rate = 16 %),that could be used for the analysis