THE ANALYSIS OF THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN INTELLECTUAL CAPITAL AND COMPANY‘S PERFORMANCE INDICATORS

Information relating to the intellectual capital disclosure is not mandatory and regulated, but in order to achieve competitive advantage, more and more companies disclose such information. One of the problems that is still not fully analyzed is the relationship between the IC disclosure and performance indicators. Therefore, in order to fill this gap, the objective of this paper is intellectual capital disclosure and the main goal is to analyse the relationship between IC and companies performance indicators. While analyzing the theoretical concepts of intellectual capital and its impact to the company, comparative analysis of scientific literature, the relevant data synthesis, abstraction and classification is performed. The empirical study used content analysis and quantitative research methods, such as correlation - regression analysis and descriptive statistics, which enable to establish links between the level of intellectual capital disclosure and company‘s performance and financial indicators. After summarizing the results, the intellectual capital disclosure model was created. In order to achieve the goal of this paper, a content analysis of IC in the annual reports by Nasdaq OMX Baltic-listed companies in the years 2011 to 2015 was performed. The present research reveals that the level of IC disclosure was not consistent. Lithuanian joint stock enterprises showed an increase of information on IC, while Estonian and Latvian enteprises disclosed less information each year. While performing the correlation – regression analysis, the greatest dependence was observed between the level of IC disclosure and company size, ownership concentration and the choice of audit company. The calculations of the company‘s leverage ratios during the period of 2011–2015 and correlation analysis showed that there is a very weak negative correlation between these variables. While analyzing the relationship between information asymmetry and the level of disclosure of information on the IC, we can see a moderate positive correlation between these variables which leads to believe that the lower the level of information asymmetry in the company is, the more information on the IC the company discloses. JEL Codes: M41, O34. DOI: https://doi.org/10.15544/ssaf.2016.1