Over 40% of U.S. COVID-19 deaths occurred in nursing homes. Given increasing private equity (PE) ownership in healthcare and long-standing concerns that PE investors focus on profits to the detriment of patients, it is important to understand the impact of PE ownership during the COVID-19...

This paper studies the impact of private equity (PE) acquisitions on quality of care in U.S. nursing homes. To do this, we examine 77 PE deals covering 1451 nursing homes between 1993 and 2017. We find significant heterogeneity in the effect of PE ownership according to levels of local market...