DETERMINANTS OF ENTERPRISE VALUE IN UZBEK JOINT-STOCK COMPANIES: A PANEL DATA ANALYSIS

Abstract

This article examines the firm-level determinants of enterprise value among joint-stock companies (JSCs) actively traded in Uzbekistan’s emerging capital market. Using a balanced panel of four large industrial issuers — Qizilqumsement, Uzmetkombinat, Qo‘qon Mechanical Plant, and Kvarts — over the period 2015–2019 (N = 20 firm-year observations), the study evaluates how leverage and a set of market-based valuation multiples relate to the natural logarithm of enterprise value (ln_EV). The candidate regressors are the debt ratio and the price-to-earnings (P/E), price-to-book (P/B), price-to-sales (P/S), and enterprise-value-to-sales (EV/S) multiples. After screening for multicollinearity through a correlation matrix and removing the most strongly collinear variables, pooled, fixed-effects, and random-effects models were estimated in EViews 9. The Hausman test favored the fixed-effects specification, which achieved a markedly higher fit (R² = 0.955). In the preferred model, EV/S is positively and significantly associated with enterprise value, P/S is negatively and significantly associated with it, and the debt ratio is statistically insignificant. Out-of-sample projections to 2023 imply that enterprise value rises by roughly 1.7 times relative to 2019, driven mainly by growth in sales revenue and the market value of shares. The findings provide empirical evidence on valuation dynamics in a frontier market and offer practical guidance for investors and corporate managers in Uzbekistan.