Capital structure in Russia: Strategic choice or credit constraints?

The debt-to-equity choice is one of the crucial corporate decisions influencing its value. Major theories and capital structure trends were introduced for developed companies. Emerging markets with a lack of information transparency, the high role of insider information, illiquid financial markets, weak corporate governance and pyramid ownership provide an environment where classic capital structure theories are unlikely to correctly describe companies' funding choices.  

On a representative sample of Russian publicly traded firms, Maria shows what was happening to the capital structure choice in Russia in 2000-2020. In her presentation, she will outline the key trends in debt-to-equity choice, discussing the role of industry factors and the macroeconomics shocks (financial crisis 2008-2009; sanctions since 2014). There will be an opportunity for Q&A. 

About the speaker: 

Maria is a part-time MPhil student at UCL SSEES and a lecturer and research fellow at the HSE University (Moscow). Her research focuses on corporate decisions, corporate governance and ownership structure in emerging capital markets. She has a personal course, "Capital Structure", at Coursera platform, which is a part of the specialization "Corporate Finance and Corporate Value". Her thesis is aimed at the financing choice of firms in emerging capital markets. Maria's research is supervised by Dr Eugene Nivororzhkin and Dr Julia Korosteleva.  

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