PurposeThe study aims to assess the relative impact of intellectual capital (IC) as opposed to tangible assets on profitability and employee performance in hotels in Serbia before and during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic.Design/methodology/approachThe current study was undertaken in 2019, the year before COVID-19, and 2020, the year of COVID-19's major impact. This study utilizes the Value-Added Intellectual Coefficient (VAIC) as a measure of efficient use of IC. Financial data were collected from 163 hotels in Serbia. Structural equation modeling (SEM) was used to test the proposed hypotheses.FindingsThe results revealed that IC was a relevant factor for both profitability and employee performance before and during the COVID-19. However, the study reveals a negative moderating effect of tangible capital efficiency (TCE), meaning that with the increase of TCE, the relationship between IC and performance becomes weaker.Research limitations/implicationsThe main limitation of the study is rooted in VAIC's ability to fully incorporate all elements of IC, leaving the relational capital out.Practical implicationsTo achieve better performance, hotel management should direct resources more towards IC and less toward tangible assets, which implies doing more with less.Originality/valueThe results indicate the importance of IC in a period of crisis for the industry and economy that are not recognized as knowledge intensive. To the best of the authors' knowledge, no other study has attempted to assess the relative contribution of tangible assets and IC before and during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Since its inception, the intellectual capital (IC) framework, which developed from accounting and financial perspectives, focused primarily on firm-level analysis. There have been several important attempts in the literature to take IC to the macroeconomic level. The purpose of this paper is to assess the relationship between national intellectual capital, proxied with modified National Intellectual Capital Index (NICI) introduced by Bontis [7], and the Human Development Index (HDI), which became an important alternative to the traditional single dimensional measure of a country's development, like the gross domestic product [42]. The paper proposes a modified NICI suggested by Užienė [52]. The analysis includes panel data regression analysis for 12 countries. The dataset incorporated longitudinal data for weighted components of the NICI index for the period of 21 years (2000-2021). The results revealed that each of the elements of NICI, namely National Human Capital (NHC), National Market Capital (NMC), National Process Capital (NPC), and National Renewal Capital (NRC), exhibits significant impact on the levels of HDI in the said period. However, all elements, apart from NRC, show significant positive impact on HDI, pointing to the conclusion that these factors represent an important foundation for achieving and maintaining national competitiveness. Contrariwise, NRC was revealed to have the significant negative impact on HDI, opening the door to the question whether NRC is a real driver of national development, or just the effect of already reached development level.