This thesis examines, through tree essays, the market s ability to incorporate the intangible benefit of R e D investment and, in the case of such benefit not reflect in the assets price properly, as appears to be the case of prior studies in developed markets, we seek to evaluate the potential underpricing of R e D investment is due to mispricing or a risk adjustment of innovative activity. Thus, the first essay evaluates whether firms that invest in research and development (R e D) have better future performance and if stock market fully value such intangible investment. The results of annual cross-sectional regressions indicate a strong association between the intensity of R e D and future performance, even after controlling for other variables that affect future performance. However, after controlling for firm characteristics and risk factors, the innovative intensity was not significant in predicting future returns. In general, the results suggest that the R e D intensity is not useful for firm valuation in Brazil. However, the first essay did not take into account the efficiency of a firm choose their R e D investments. Following the methodology proposed by Cohen, Dietther and Malloy (2013 ), we estimate the firm s Ability to Innovate in Brazil to reflect the individual ability of firms to convert their R e D investments into sales. In addition to this ability metric, we propose a measure that incorporates the benefits of innovations in costs, not embedded by Ability in Sales. A long-short portfolio strategy and the evaluation of 3 and 4 factors models suggest that the Ability in Sales is associated with higher future returns than Ability in Costs, earning significant abnormal return of 27.12 percent annually, compared to 18.3 percent for Ability in Costs . It should be noted , however, that these results were not confirmed by monthly cross-sectional regressions. Finally, the third essay examines the sources of the potential R e D undervaluation. Our results indicate that a long-short strategy based on industry-adjusted R e D intensity provides significant abnormal return of 5.28 percent per year, even after controlling for other risk factors. The analysis of risk factors also indicates that one cannot attribute the presence of abnormal returns to systematic risk, indicating that the underpricing in the period is due to mispricing. In fact, results obtained from cross-sectional regressions show that firms with greater industry-adjusted R e D intensity are less risky than those with low intensity. In addition, using analyst coverage as a proxy for investor attention, we show that companies with high industry-adjusted R e D intensity providing more information to the market about their innovation projects can mitigate approximately 40 percent of its potential undervaluation.