This paper investigates how corporate governance of unlisted firms in an emerging market economy affects financing constraints, measured by the sensitivity of investment to cash flow. In order to evaluate the quality of corporate governance, we develop two corporate governance indices based on a large-scale survey of Russian enterprises – one for shareholder protection and one for transparency. We estimate standard investment regressions where the cash flow variable is interacted with our corporate governance indices and variables capturing the ownership structure. The central result is that better shareholder protection diminishes the cash flow sensitivity of investment, particularly in firms with an outside controlling owner. In contrast, we do not find such an effect for transparency, which can be partially explained by the threat of hostile takeovers. We address the problem of the endogeneity of corporate governance by using fixed-effects regressions and a novel instrumental variable based on particular legal provisions for corporate governance in Russia depending on the number of shareholders.

本文研究了新兴市场经济中未上市公司的公司治理如何影响融资约束，以投资对现金流的敏感性来衡量。为了评估公司治理的质量，我们根据对俄罗斯企业的大规模调查开发了两种公司治理指数——一种用于股东保护，另一种用于透明度。我们估计标准投资回归，其中现金流变量与我们的公司治理指数和捕捉所有权结构的变量相互作用。核心结果是更好的股东保护降低了投资的现金流敏感性，特别是在拥有外部控制所有者的公司中。相比之下，我们没有发现这样的透明度效果，这可以部分解释为敌意收购的威胁。我们通过使用固定效应回归和一个新的工具变量来解决公司治理的内生性问题，该工具变量基于俄罗斯公司治理的特定法律规定，具体取决于股东数量。