International Private Equity Flows

Over the 15 past years, international PE flows have become increasingly important. The goal of this chapter is to present evidence and academic research on this topic and to stress how the international spread of capital affected the overall development of the PE industry. Specifically, we will first show how internationalization affected PE flows in terms of the funds invested in PE firms. In addition, the central part of this chapter will focus on direct international investments of PE firms. More specifically, we focus on developed PE markets, i.e. Western Europe, North America and Oceania. We discuss the characteristics of international deals and international investors, including the importance of regional clustering of international funds and syndication in non-domestic investments. Later, we will discuss the internationalization of PE investors towards emerging markets. While we stress the importance of international investment behaviour, we do highlight that there are still some barriers for increasing globalization as well. Hence, this industry is still segmented to some extent, and this is likely to remain so in the near future. Our chapter ends with some avenues for future research in this area