The Role of R&D Capitalisations in Firm Valuation and Perfor Mance Measurement

Abstract

We investigate the value‐relevance of capitalised R&D on the balance sheet, and the extent to which R&D accruals improve the association between accounting‐based measures of firm perfor Mance and capital market returns for Australian listed companies. This is a regulatory setting where management discretion in the capitalisation decision is permitted and can be empirically observed. Our results suggest that capitalised R&D on the balance sheets of selective capitalisers is value‐relevant; that is, the ability of capitalised R&D to explain infor Mation contained in prices (given infor Mation conveyed by other components of the balance sheet) is statistically significant. For the same group of firms R&D accruals (particularly the initial capitalisation) improve accounting earnings as a measure of perfor Mance but only for the pooled sample using contemporaneous returns. The results for the fully expensing sample are less clear, perhaps due to the small sample size.