Intangibles and Value Creation at the Industrial Level: Delineating Their Complementarities

This paper investigates the effect of intangible assets on value creation for 16 French industries from 1980 to 2007. This work is based on original intangible investment data build from the French national accounts and encompassing a wide variety of assets. Our research yields several results. First, data analysis shows that, despite common thought, manufacturing industries are more intangible intensive than service industries. Second, by estimating aggregate and industry-level production functions, we find that the contribution of intangible assets is highly heterogeneous across industries. While the car industry, consumption good industry and financial services use these assets efficiently, the picture is less clear for other industries. Finally, an analysis in terms of complementarities is proposed, leading to delineating possible combinatory intangibles , contributing to value creation.