Maria Kokoreva

Supervisor: Dr Eugene Nivorozhkin and Dr Julia Korosteleva

Present Status: PhD candidate

Working title of thesis: Financial Decisions of Regulated Industries in Emerging Markets

Research: Capital structure choice is one of the crucial corporate financial decisions since it influences a firm’s set of conflicts of interests between the stakeholders; investment decisions, payout decisions and finally its value. The management keeps in mind different motives while choosing the capital structure strategy. Still, the theoretical foundation (trade-off theory, pecking order theory, market timing theory) implies the unregulated market, leaving a large set of companies that are under the regulation aside. In our research, we assume that there is still scope left to choose the capital structure and influence the financial performance through this instrument.

The major research question is how the debt-to-equity ratio is determined in companies, where state ownership; corporate governance; local, regional and federal authorities play a significant role. We are trying to figure out whether the basic corporate finance theories still could be applied for these firms.