Personal and behavioral traits of top management and members of the boards of directors and their impact on companies became hot parts of the academic agenda in finance. We explore several areas in this field.

First,CEO (CFO) portraits. October 2020 - March 2022 to develop the profiles of executives, mainly of Russian firms. We use the Russian market as a lab for studying decision-making in the market with the significant role of state by both data-mining of publicly available data and by surveys focused on:

a) the overall personal portrait (incl. religion, ethnic, family, habits, hobbies, etc.);

b) management styles;

c) the risk-taking & investment horizon (short termism-versus long term vision);

d) leadership types (roles) compared within similar group of firms (similarity of firms);

e) behavioral biases due to irrational decision-making : overconfidence, status-quo bias, anchoring, other cognitive biases.

To identify their potential impact over a variety of corporate financial decisions (investing,financing, payout), M&A; recovery out of crisis; digital transformation of the company. 

Second, to study and to classify personal and behavioral traits of members of the board of directors and develop director’s profiles. Explore the mitigating role of the boards in eliminating or enhancing some behavioral executive’s biases depending on  director’s profiles.

Third, potential impact of director’s profiles over: risk-taking; promoting innovations; pushing non-financial reporting; developing sustainable finance and strategy; M&A post integration; digitalization; crisis recoveries

Fourth, develop partnerships with HSE Business school, sociology labs, different business associations, large scale companies to develop, distribute surveys and build data bases.

Financing choice is a crucial decision at any stage of a firm life cycle, from the start-up stage to the firm’s decline. The project covers the research area of fundraising (debt, equity (IPO, SEO), ICO, crowdfunding) and the following choice of an optimal debt-to-equity ratio.

The project is mainly focused on the preparation of the monograph on capital structure in emerging capital markets for publication in Springer monography series. Therefore, the major research questions involve:

·     Intercountry trends in aggregate capital structure in Emerging Capital Markets
·     Stylized facts of capital structure
·     The determinants and traditional Capital Structure theories relevance in Emerging Capital Markets
·     Debt conservatism & Cash management
·     Alternative Concepts of Capital Structure and their Relevance for Emerging Markets
·     New ways of capital raising: ICO, crowdfunding

All of the issues are discussed in terms of comparison of innovative and non-innovative firms, firms from emerging versus developed countries. The individual term papers and theses are expected to cover the topics from the list above but new ideas with the related research questions are welcomed.

Tasks of the project:

- literature reviews on financing choice
- creating (and updating) the database of emerging capital markets
- updating (and creating new) results of classic theories testing
- proposing the models for ICO and crowdfunding choices in emerging capital markets and the models testing
- development of graphic material under the requirements of the publishing house;
- academic texts formatting 

The goal of the project is to rethink the M&A deals performance and processes in the current changing economic environment in developed and emerging capital markets.  This involves searching for (1) new metrics to assess the performance of M&A deals, (2) new determinants of M&A performance and activity, (3) new insights on the processes of M&A and their relationship to M&A performance, and (4) new evidence on influence of M&A performance on the economic or industry wealth and competitiveness.