Structural Capital and Sticky Behavior of Selling, General & Administrative Expenses: Evidence from Tehran Stock Exchange

Many studies have showed that changes in costs are not appropriated to the changes in sales. As importance of intangible assets is increased in the third millennium, the main purpose of this study is to investigate empirically the impact of structural capital as one of the most important intangible assets, on stickiness of selling, general and administrative (SG&A) expenses for listed companies in Tehran Stock Exchange (TSE). Therefore, in this study data of a sample consisting of 110 listed companies in the TSE in period from 2005 to 2014 was investigated. Pulic’s (2000) model was employed to measure structural capital. Also, to test the hypothesis, an extended model of Anderson, Banker and Janakiraman’s (2003) was used. Results indicated that although the behavior of SG&A expenses is sticky, there is no significant relationship between capital structure and sticky behavior of SG&A expenses.