Value relevance of customer-related intangible assets

This study examines the stock market’s valuation of customer-related intangible assets for a sample of publicly-traded U.S. firms. Customer-related intangible assets are found to be positively associated with equity prices, but valued at a discount relative to goodwill. These results suggest that value-relevant information is lost if customer-related intangible assets are subsumed into goodwill rather than being reported separately. This evidence can be useful to standard setters potentially considering extending to public companies a recent FASB Accounting Standards Update allowing private companies not to recognize separately from goodwill certain customer-related intangible assets.