Влияние структуры капитала на капитализацию торгуемых российских компаний

The combination of debt and equity in capital structure is a central aspect in a process of corporate financial policies development. The specific amount of debt and equity stated on a company’s Balance sheet can influence its cash flows, risks and earnings leading to changes in corporate performance and value. For this reason, since the middle of the last century capital structure has become a crucially important topic for financial managers and decision-makers.
According to financial theory, the main purpose of an organization is to increase a shareholders’ value. In that case, the main concern of company’s managers in relation to capital structure is to create such a proportion of equity and debt that maximizes value of a company. This means that the capital structure could be considered as an intrinsic tool of a company’s value management.
In general, the impact of capital structure can be evaluated by means of leverage ratios. They are divided into financial leverage ratios (market value) and book leverage ratios (accounting value) (Ferris, Hanousek, Shamshur, & Tresl, 2018). Many researchers in their studies apply financial leverage measures ((Titman, Hovakimian, & Opler, 2001), (FAMA & FRENCH, 1998), (Welch, 2004), (LEARY & ROBERTS, 2005)) and accounting leverage ratios ((ROBERTS & SUFI, 2009), (Cai & Zhang, 2011), (DeAngelo, DeAngelo, & Whited, 2011), (DeANGELO & ROLL, 2015)). For the current research analysis, the accounting measures of leverage are applied as, in comparison to financial (market) leverage, they bring specific benefits.
The topic importance for both academic and practical areas is undebatable. Therefore, by means of this study the following research gap can be filled.
Despite the existence of high number of various research papers devoted to the relationships between capital structure and corporate value, since the release of the fundamental study on the topic – Modigliani and Miller theorem – the discussions are still in process.
Many research papers show opposing empirical results due to specifics of the market, industries, economic environment and other aspects, as well as they focus more on the analysis of financial leverage ratios. And yet, the application of accounting measures in the research in comparison to financial leverage brings specific benefits, such as less time-consuming valuation based on the accounting data which is easy to obtain; more usefulness for short-term financial decisions, as financial leverage is used only for long-term perspective; possibility of the management by financial decision-makers, while financial leverage is predetermined by market forces.
This lack of clear and precise studies leads to the problem that the existing results on the topic are controversial and there is no clear answer of the impact of capital structure on the value of a firm. Furthermore, the topic is extremely popular to examine on emerging markets and in developing countries. However, the current research studies on the issue in Russia are limited. This means that the paper can broaden the analysis of the question on the Russian market and construct the basics for the further research. In all points mentioned above, the clear gap is presented. Therefore, the analysis of the issue based on the public financial data of listed Russian companies is necessary.
The research goal of the paper is to determine the relationship between capital structure considered in terms of accounting debt ratios and a company’s valuation based on the analysis of listed Russian companies.
The research paper aims to address two main points, including the following:
• to provide an insight into the question and specifics of the capital structure in general by
analyzing the existing literature and empirical studies;
• to evaluate the possible impact of the capital structure of the largest Russian public companies
on a company’s value.
Therefore, to achieve the main goal, the following research questions are outlined:
• How do debt and long-term debt ratios affect the accounting measures of company’s value of
Russian companies? Is this influence significant and positive or negative or not significant?
• How do the debt and long-term debt ratios affect the market measures of company’s value of
Russian companies? Is this influence significant and positive or negative or not significant?
• Does the industry factor influence on the relationship between capital structure and company’s
valuation in Russia? Do the relationships differ from one industry to another?
In an attempt to provide answers to these questions, the research sample is built, the possible metrics are chosen and analyzed. The study critically evaluates the relationship between capital structure represented by the accounting debt measures and corporate valuation of listed on Moscow Stock Exchange companies in Russia over the period from 2015 to 2019, and examines the relationships in three different industries to check if they have distinct specifics.
The following research problems are stated:
• To divide the empirical studies on the topic into various groups, according to the development
of the economies and markets, and to examine them, in order to construct the basics for the
research analysis and to identify if there are country/market specifics of such relationships;
• To test four main hypotheses based on the general sample examining the relationships between
five accounting leverage ratios and ROA, ROE, Tobin’s Q and EPS;
• To test three additional hypotheses on the samples consisting of companies belonging to three
distinct industries: Oil and gas, Retail and Electric utilities, in order to check the industry
impact;
• To analyze the results and to make the conclusions and to provide managerial applications and
recommendations based on the findings.
The various sources of theoretical studies are applied and analyzed for the purpose of this research paper. They include academic papers, periodical journals, electronic articles, statistics from different information agencies, annual reports of the companies and databases information.
The research structure is the following: introduction, three main chapters on theoretical part, methodological part and models result, conclusion, references and appendix.
In the first chapter, the main theoretical aspects on the capital structure issue are presented, as well as the main theories on capital structure and main empirical studies are examined. Also, the main accounting and market measures of firm’s performance are described.
In the second chapter, the methodology of the research paper is described together with the variables applied for the analysis and formulation of the key hypotheses.
In the third chapter, the results of the models are presented and summarized, and the recommendations and managerial applications along with limitations and further research suggestions are presented.