Board of Directors' Structure and Credit Quality of Russian Non-financial Companies

Current research determines how the structure of the board impacts the credit quality of Russian non-financial companies through utilizing panel data in the time frame of 2016-2021. It was used board size, independence, gender diversity, level of expertise, and number of meetings to determine different structures of boards. The country that is used for this study depicts the features of an emerging economy that were not widely discussed in the chosen field. This paper starts with a comprehensive literature review and hypothesis development part. It is divided into blocks where every part is based on one of the characteristics of the board’s structure and theories devoted to it, and an overall review of the corporate governance. A number of different estimation methods have been employed, and to overcome endogeneity issues, the Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) was considered superior. The findings give the insight that board size has a quadratic relationship with credit quality and negatively impacts the credit quality, while the level of expertise in the board has a beneficial impact. It all coincides with a proposed hypothesis at the beginning of the research paper. Board independence, gender diversity, and the number of meetings did not show a direct influence on the creditworthiness of Russian non-financial companies, which is possibly due to the sample limitations. Overall, this study goes in line with existing knowledge in this sphere and sheds light on this topic in the chosen country.