Government Ownership and the Performance of Russian Companies

In this paper, investigating the influence of state ownership on the firm performance in Russia. On the one hand, state ownership gives companies access to bank guarantees, concessional loans and subsidies, on the other hand, a qualitative change in the management of a company and a decrease in enterprise productivity are possible. Accordingly, the impact of state property on the performance of companies may be ambiguous. In view of the tendency to concentration of state property in strategically important sectors of the country, as well as a small amount of work on analyzing the relationship between state property and the performance of companies in Russia, we see the need to explore this problem for Russian traded companies. The empirical analysis is based on the analysis of panel data on Russian companies traded in the period from 2009 to 2013 on the stock exchange. By three methods for evaluating models, the effect exerted by the presence of state property in the company's share capital structure on the results of the company’s activities was evaluated. The method of instrumental variables was also used in the work to combat the endogeneity of the main explanatory variables. According to the results of the analysis, the main hypothesis about the negative impact of state ownership on the performance of companies has not been confirmed. We observe a negative correlation between the share of state ownership in the company's capital structure and the Tobin's ratio, the profitability of capital, but due to the insignificance of estimates of the coefficients in the models used, we cannot assert that there is a causal relationship.