THE DETERMINANTS OF INTANGIBILITY

ABSTRACT The study of intangible assets has attracted increasing interest in the recent years. By force of this trend, the study of companies that intensely use this type of asset is also relevant. The intangible assets are responsible for great changes in the financial and operational characteristics of the companies. Following this assumption, an important question to be analyzed is whether significant differences between tangible-intensive and intangible-intensive companies exist. Thus, the objective of this paper is to analyze the possible financial-economic determinants of the intangibility of the Brazilian companies. The results show that two variables related to the debt level and to the size of companies are important in the differentiation between the intangible-intensive and tangible-intensive firms in Brazil.