Ownership Concentration and Corporate Governance in Russia: Structural Changes Under Internal and External Shocks

This thesis aims to investigate the effects of ownership concentration on the market and accounting performance of Russian companies over the period 2010 - 2022. We analyze the relationship between ownership structures and key performance indicators, providing insights into the effectiveness of current governance practices using the sample of 157 public companies which were/are included into the broad MOEX index. We differentiate between the market performance and the accounting performance using different proxies to capture the various effects caused by the changes in ownership structure. The research will be supported by a comprehensive review of the literature and empirical analysis, showing the details of the interplay between ownership concentration and corporate performance in Russia. The methodology of analysis is based on the application of standard panel data approaches (both fixed and random effects) and the problem of endogeneity is accounted for by the inclusion of lagged explanatory variables which excludes the reverse causality in the model. The robustness is checked by the alternative proxies and the GMM model estimation. All in all, we can highlight the following results. First of all, the positive effect of level of ownership concentration is shown to be moderately significant for both market indicator for both HHI and top-3 shareholders’ ownership while not significant for the models with ROA as a dependent variable. Regarding the model capturing the dynamics in ownership, this variable was revealed to be moderately significant again only for the specification with Tobin Q as a dependent variable. Another interesting result is the significant impact for the presence of the government as a controlling shareholder is not significant in any variation of the model for the chosen sample of observations. Finally the presence of the foreign investors with a strategic motives significantly and positively affects the market performance of the company being insignificant for the same model with respect to the accounting performance.