Seminar ‘CEO Turnover and Firm Performance in Russia: the Effect of Economic Crisis’

On June 16 a joint research seminar of the Laboratory for Labour Market Studies and the Centre for Labour Market Studies was held at HSE. Olga Lazareva, Associate Professor at the Department of Applied Economics delivered the report ‘CEO Turnover and Firm Performance in Russia: the Effect of Economic Crisis’, co-authored by Sergey Solntsev, Senior Research Fellow at the Laboratory for Labour Market Studies.

On June 16 a joint research seminar of the Laboratory for Labour Market Studies and the Centre for Labour Market Studies was held at HSE. Olga Lazareva, Associate Professor at the Department of Applied Economics delivered the report ‘CEO Turnover and Firm Performance in Russia: the Effect of Economic Crisis’, co-authored by Sergey Solntsev, Senior Research Fellow at the Laboratory for Labour Market Studies.

Abstract:

The link between firm performance and CEO turnover is often considered as an indicator of properly functioning governance mechanisms: shareholders should be able to replace an underperforming CEO. This is particularly important in the emerging markets with their typically weak institutional environment and poor shareholder rights protection. In this paper we use the unique data on 355 largest Russian firms to study the link between CEO turnover and firm performance over the period of 2003-2012. We pay particular attention to the period of economic crisis in 2008-2009. While total CEO turnover has increased significantly during the crisis we find important differences between firms that were promised state support during the crisis compared to the firms that had to overcome the crisis on their own.