Tobin’s q and Intangible Assets

In a recent paper Laitner & Stolyarov (2003) assert that measured Tobin’s q has usually been well above 1, and use this to back up their conclusion that there are significant quantities of unrecorded intangible assets. This key feature of q turns out however to be entirely due to errors and omissions in the authors’ calculations. The corrected q series turns out to be usually well below unity.