The Capital Structure of Russian Companies: Testing Trade-off Theory Versus Pecking Order Theory

Abstract

The capital structure researches, carried out on the emerging markets, are mainly devoted to the analysis of the companies’ choice determinants of the debt to equity ratio. The fact that these problems stir a lot of interest to day may be explained by a number of reasons and, first of all, by lasting substantial capital market institutions’ differences, the level and factors of investment risks that differ from those of the countries with developed market economy. The question of evaluating the degrees of influence similar determinants have on the long-term financial development of companies operating in different structures of the capital market is being posed. The dynamics and driving forces of possible changes in the emerging company capital structures on such markets are still to be investigated. Finally, there is a separate substantive issue of assessing the role of capital structure and its potential contribution in maximizing company value on the emerging markets. This article is thus aimed at constructing a model that could describe the capital structure choice of the Russian major public companies. The two basic capital structure theories аre being tested: the Pecking Order Theory and the Trade-off Theory. The article is presented in the following way: in the first part we give an overview of the research papers on the problem of capital structure in the emerging markets, the second part focuses on the methods used for testing the above mentioned theories and analyses of our sample of the Russian data and methodology, and, finally, in the third part we introduce and interpret the results of the empirical analysis.