The Effects of Ownership Structure on Default on the Bonds in the Russian Companies

In this paper author attempts to answer the following question: how does the ownership structure affects the default on the bonds in the Russian companies. The basic hypothesis suggests that this influence should be statistically significant. This relationship is due to the existence of an agency conflict between stakeholders and company managers. During the collection of required data, author has formed a sample of 190 Russian companies from several sectors of the economy. The period under investigation is from 2008 to 2015 which allows us to see the differences in the effects of the factors on default at different stages of the business cycle. The analysis showed that the ownership structure affects the default on the bonds only in a crisis. However, in the post-crisis period it is difficult to draw a conclusion about the influence of the ownership structure due to the small number of defaults in the sample. In addition, during the analysis, author distinguish the companies which switched and not switched to the formation of their financial statements under IFRS. The significance of this work is expressed in the fact that until now there are few studies about relationships between ownership structure and default on Russian data. The novelty of the results obtained in this work is to reveal the different influence of the ownership structure on default in different periods. At the same time, the author notice that this study has some limitations, including endogenous and limited sample of collected data.