رفتار امور اداره شرکت و ارزش بازار شرکت های روسی

I examine the relationship between corporate governance behavior and market value for a sample of 21 Russian firms. I use (1) fall 1999 corporate governance rankings for these firms, developed by a Russian investment bank, and (2) the ‘value ratio’ of actual market capitalization to potential Western market capitalization for these firms, determined independently by a second Russian investment bank. The correlation between ln(value ratio) and governance ranking is striking and statistically strong: Pearson r=0.90 (t=8.97). A worst (51 ranking) to best (7 ranking) governance improvement predicts a 700-fold increase in firm value. These results are tentative because of the small sample, but they suggest that corporate governance behavior has a powerful effect on market value in a country where legal and cultural constraints on corporate behavior are weak.

How strongly does a firm's corporate governance behavior affect the market value of its shares? Intuitively, governance behavior should matter. But evidence that the governance behavior of United States firms affects their market value is scarce. Most tests of whether variations in corporate governance behavior between US firms affect firm value find either no effect or an economically small effect. And yet, perhaps the weak results are found largely because the variation in US firms’ behavior is small. After all, the minimum quality of American corporate governance, set by law and by norms so widely accepted that almost no public firms depart from them, is quite high.

I test the hypothesis that high governance ranking (low governance quality) correlates negatively with firm value. I run a simple regression (equivalent to computing the Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient r) of ln(value ratio) as dependent variable, on governance ranking as independent variable. The regression equation and related statistics are shown in Table 4. Fig. 1 shows the raw data and the fitted regression line.