Empirical Examination of the Relationship Between Intellectual Capital with the Operating Cash Flow and Weighted Average Cost of Capital

Nowadays, in order to maximize achieving goals and strategies, organizations have to identify, measure and manage their Intangible Assets (IA). Intellectual Capital (IC) is considered as one of the most important parts of organizations' IA. On the other hand, considering the fact that corporations' cost of capital is one of the key factors affecting capital budgeting, financial decision makings and macro assessment of corporations' functions, and also due to the fact that cash flow is the ultimate and tangible outcome of a profit unit, this paper is to present theresults of an experimental study on the relation between IC with two important factors affecting on performance (i.e. operating cash flow andweighted average cost of capital) in Tehran Stock Exchange (TSE) between 2005 to 2009. Two fundamental hypotheses of this research suppose a negative significant relationship between IC and WACC but a positive significant relationship between IC and corporations' operating cash flow. The findings confirm the above hypotheses. The results imply that by enhancing and applying efficient and fruitful management of IC, corporations' WACC can be expected to be cut back due to the enhancement of knowledge level, intellectual ability and their becoming more intelligent on one hand, and their increasing of the operating cash flow on other. Therefore, utilization of this effective IC for obtaining a higher financial yields and a better future performance could be suggested

Keywords:

knowledge management , intellectual capital , weighted average cost of capital , operating cash flow , Q Tobin