The Re-Emerging Role of the State in Contemporary Russia

I examine ownership structure of Russian firms during the 1998-2006 period, where a greater emphasis is placed on motivations behind increased government ownership in the latter years, when oligarchs' opportunistic influence on the firm diminished as state ownership correspondingly increased. As this phenomenon is also correlated with improved corporate growth during the period, I argue that state participation in corporate governance acted as an effective substitute mechanism to constrain wealth-tunnelling behaviour of corporate insiders and local bureaucrats in a country defined by a weak property rights system. © 2012 Springer-Verlag

The effect of state-private co-partnership system on Russian industry

In Russia at the turn of the new millennium, the Putin regime introduced a system of state-private co-partnership with corporate private investors. We argue that this policy had the effect of reducing the likelihood that firm managers-investors would adopt suboptimal investment time horizons. The strategy also served to protect state subsidies to corporations and outside investment funds from expropriation. Using firm-level data that are published by the Russian Trading System stock exchange and the SKRIN database that spans 1998–2006, we test the success of this strategy during this formative era for the modern Russian corporation. We find that co-ownership played an important role in generating improved long-term performance, particularly in industries with high asset-specificity. We also show that the policy was most effective in industries in which firms tended to undertake large lump-sum investments