Influence of the Board of the Directors' Personal Characteristics and Structure on the Enterprise Value

The purpose of this research is to find such characteristics and structure of the Board of Directors, which have a joint impact on the value of the largest public Russian companies, and to determine the extent of this influence. The sample included 41 firm for the period 2009-2013 (205 year-firm observations). The author used two variants of the dependent variables: the natural logarithm of enterprise value (EV) and the Tobin’s Q ratio. As a result, the model with Tobin’s Q was chosen as the main one. The following results were obtained: increasing the number of women on the Board leads to company’s value growth. On the other hand, increasing the number of participants of BoD on more than 10, and an increase in the number of independent Directors negatively affects firm’s value. In addition, regression showed that the proxy of firm’s value depends positively on Directors with experience in the same industry. This study could be used as the basis for subsequent researches about how characteristics of Board of Directors and its structure influence on Russian firms’ performance.