The Wedge between Ownership and Control and Dividend Policy of Russian Companies

The graduation qualification work raises the issue of the ordinary shares’ dividend policy and the largest shareholder’s gap between ownership and control rights achieved by issuing non-voting shares. The analysis fills the lack of academic research on the topic on Russian companies’ data and sheds light on the patterns and features of the gap that is peculiar to the Russian investment market. The study was conducted on the data of Russian non-financial companies listed on the Moscow Exchange in the period from 2011 to 2018. The analysis of panel versions of tobit models, linear models with fixed and random effects did not allow to establish the impact of the largest shareholder’s gap in ownership and control on the size of total dividends and dividends per one share of the company. The study of cross-sectional and panel ordered and disordered probit and logit models did not reveal a stable relationship between the probability and frequency of dividend payments and the gap between ownership and control of the main shareholder, however, some evidence of an increase in the probability and frequency of dividend payments with the gap growth was found.