Organisation capital and sticky behaviour of selling, general and administrative expenses

• We find that firms with high (low) levels of organisation capital exhibit SG&A cost stickiness (anti-stickiness).
• We find that firms with high (low) levels of R&D capital exhibit SG&A cost stickiness (anti-stickiness).
• Our results are robust against industry effects and alternative explanations of sticky cost phenomenon.

This study investigates how a firm's view towards intangible-related economic sacrifices affects the stickiness of selling, general and administrative (SG&A) expenses. The sticky cost phenomenon is an alternative pattern of cost behaviour which attributes an explicit role to managerial deliberate resource-commitment decisions. We speculate that, in a sales decline, firms with high levels of intangible assets increase the slack of their unutilised resources more than firms with low levels of intangible assets. This is because a high level of intangible investments increases the level of adjustment costs and drives managers to shape more optimistic expectations regarding whether future sales growth will absorb the slack of unutilised resources. The level of organisation capital is selected as the primary variable of a firm's intensity of intangible investments in order to examine the relation between the cost behaviour of SG&A expenses and intangible investments. The data sample consists of 55,769 firm-year observations of US listed firms for the period 1979–2009. Our empirical findings suggest that in the case of firms with high (low) organisation capital, SG&A expenses exhibit sticky (anti-sticky) cost behaviour.