The Empirical Study of the Association Betweem Intellectual Capital and Operating Performance: An Exapmle on Technical Human Capital of Taiwanese Information and Electronic Industry

• Main Authors: Liao Chih-Hsien, 廖芝嫻
• Other Authors: 歐進士
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2002
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/00374388087645346774

碩士 === 國立政治大學 === 會計學系 === 90 === Management theory has gradually accepted that ‘hidden assets’ or most recently ‘intellectual capital’, especially human capital, increasingly play a major role for the survival of companies. With the coming of knowledge economy, knowledge and competence of employees have become the most important sources of competitive advantage. The reason why Taiwanese information and electronic industry has grown rapidly these years lies in the key factor of technology intensity and knowledge intensity. Since technology is the soul of this industry and technology must be realized directly through technicians, this study intends to examine the association between technical human capital intensity and corporate operating performance. The sample used in this study consists of 57 information and electronic companies listed on TSE and ROSE from 1991 to 2000, totally 241 observations. We collect the data of number of technicians from Public Offering Prospectus. This study uses multi-regression model as the empirical method to test the hypothesis that the technical human capital intensity and corporate operating performance are positively related. In addition, we include R&D intensity, labor compensation level, labor productivity and company scale as the subordinate independent variables. Our results provide strong evidence that higher technical human capital intensity leads to better operating performance. Besides, when the gross profit is used to measure profitability, the Adj-R2 of the model achieves 50%, which means the major impact of technicians on corporate performance is reflected in the reduction of manufacturing costs or cost of goods sold. We also investigate more about how the variation of technical human capital influences the operating performance. The result shows that when the number of technicians increases 10%, the operating income increases 4.4%. As for other subordinate variables, R&D intensity, labor compensation level and labor productivity are all significantly positively related to operating performance.