The Stock Market Valuation of Human Capital Creation

We develop measures of firm-level human capital creation from publicly disclosed personnel expenses (PE) and examine the stock market valuation of these characteristics. Separately measuring human capital creation efficacy and opportunity, we first show that efficacy is positively associated with characteristics of human-capital-intensive firms and employee productivity growth. Next, we find that efficacy has a positive pricing coefficient, implying that the market recognizes some of its variation. In our main analysis, long-short portfolios based on the human capital creation efficacy (opportunity) produce annualized abnormal returns of 4.0 to 5.4% (6.0 to 7.5%). Portfolios formed on the combination of efficacy and opportunities produce the strongest abnormal returns of 6.3 to 9.3% in annualized terms. Our results provide evidence of the importance to valuation of accurate human capital measurement.