PurposeThis research aims to contribute to the current discussion led by international accounting bodies on intellectual capital narratives. Before setting a standard, a preliminary step is to highlight intellectual capital components' sources of value. The objective of this exploratory paper is to contribute to the discussion by proposing a detailed description and taxonomy of intellectual capital based on an analysis of discretionary accounting narrative disclosures in CEO letters.Design/methodology/approachTo answer the research question, a computerised lexical content analysis was done of 241 letters from the CEOs of S&P Euro 350 companies addressed to shareholders.FindingsBeyond the required disclosures about balance sheet intangibles, this study brings to light discretionary narratives about human, digital, customer and environmental capital and their interactions. In particular, CEOs are promoting two new themes, environmental capital and digital capital, as major contributors to value creation.Research limitations/implicationsThe limitations of this study are inherent in the media studied, namely the CEOs' letters to shareholders, which were written as part of the firms' official communication.Practical implicationsThe main contribution of the research is a detailed description of the intellectual capital components that CEOs consider to be at the heart of their companies' models to create value. Human and customer capital were already familiar under the previous classification, but CEOs present digital and environmental capital as areas of opportunity or risk in their discretionary narratives.Originality/valueThe article contributes to the current international discussions on intellectual capital by focusing on discretionary accounting narratives. It seeks to provide guidelines concerning future standards in the current stage of intellectual capital research.

Intangible assets are fundamental generators of companies' competitive advantage. While the tangible assets were the most important company's resources in the past, nowadays, the intellectual resources determine the success of a company. Intangible resources represent the non-physical substances, which are difficult to define, measure and valuate. Thus, the purpose of the paper is to analyze the valuation methods of intangible assets in the area of the traditional accounting framework. The paper addresses the importance of the intangible assets in management literature, and links various valuation methods of intangible assets to the context of economics, business and strategic management.

In this paper the contribution of intellectual capital components in the overall intellectual capital value is investigated. This paper adopted quantitative statistical methods Lambda phase measurement and Shapley's value on the sample of 498 French companies in the period of 2008 to 2016 in order to estimate the highest and lowest contributions of intellectual capital components. For the purpose of the study, the official financial information from the companies' annual reports were taken from the financial database "Point Risk". The paper concentrates on two out of three intellectual capital components: structural and customer capital components. By the Shapley's value final result, the customer capital component, which represents company's commercial activities with the coefficient of 0.29911, is of greatest importance. On the other side, the lowest importance belongs to the structural capital component that represents value coming from research and development expenses with the coefficient of 0.07463 This study contributes to the management sciences literature by examining distribution of contribution of two intellectual capital components in the annual reports of French companies.

Enhancing agricultural and other environmental performances has become an essential part of sustainable development policy in countries around the globe. Although Europe is considered as a global leader in the environmental competitiveness, the national economies within Europe region achieve different results in this field. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate current agricultural and other environmental performances of sixteen Central and East European (CEE) countries, but also to identify critical determinants for its improvement in the future period. The research is conducted through comparative analysis, benchmarking method, and correlation analysis. The data basis includes the Environmental Performance Index (2018). The research findings suggest the inferiority of CEE countries in the comparison with the bestranked European countries. The paper contributes to the sustainability literature and could serve as a practical guide in the process of formulating the development policies connected with agricultural and other environmental performances in CEE countries.

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