The Influence of Political Connections and Government Ownership on Firm Performance: Evidence from Russia

Abstract

Political connections and their influence on firm performance is one of the most relevant topics of corporate governance for emerging markets, and Russia is not an exception. The composition of the Board of Directors has on impact on the whole range of key corporate decisions, both investing and financing. The presence of an official can either exacerbate agency problems, leading to decreasing efficiency, or, conversely, result in an improvement of performance due to a variety of preferences and benefits from political power. The direction of influence has been the heart of academic discussions and among the different social groups, however, the lack of relevant researches for Russia exists.
Based on hand-collected corporate panel data for the period from 2011 to 2014, we investigate the influence of political connections on non-financial Russian listed enterprises. A sample of 106 companies is divided into two sub-samples: politically connected firms (PCF) and firms that do not possess the trait (NCF). This article is devoted to the exploration of two fundamental issues. How does a politically connected person on the board of directors influence the access to the debt financing, its cost and key firm performance indicators? And, in general, what role do the outside PC-directors play in corporate governance? ROA, EBIT-margin, assets turnover, ROE and q-Tobin are used as performance measures.

With the means of panel data analysis we have showed that there is a nonlinear dependence between the degree of political interdependence and the company's balance-sheet efficiency: a positive impact on it is achieved only below 27% of the board’s affiliation. It indirectly gives evidence for the agency theory. In addition, we find a quadratic relationship between the share of politically connected directors and the amount of cash in the accounts. However, it should be noted that the main effect comes from the political connections of the federal level. Hypotheses about the positive impact of political connections on the access to debt financing and the negative - on the cost of debt, were not confirmed.