A long-standing controversy is whether LBOs relieve managers from short-term pressures from public shareholders, or whether LBO funds themselves are driven by short-term profit motives and sacrifice long-term growth to boost short-term performance. We investigate 495 transactions with a focus on...

The ifo Investment Survey asks firms in the German manufacturing sector about the importance of sales, technological factors, finance, return expectations, and macroeconomic policy for their investment activity in a given year. We show that these subjective investment determinants 1) capture...

Are fluctuations in firms' profitability risk a major cause of regular business cycles? We study this question within the framework of a heterogeneous-firm dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with fixed capital adjustment costs. In such a model, surprise increases of risk lead to a...

Local daily newspapers historically played an important role in U.S. democracy by providing citizens with information about local policy issues. In recent decades, local newspapers have struggled to compete with new online platforms. In the first study of private equity (PE) in a struggling...

Standard measures of private equity performance based on cash flows overlook discount rate risk. An index constructed from prices paid in secondary market transactions indicates that private equity discount rates vary considerably. While the standard alpha for our index is zero, measures of...

This paper provides an introduction to buyouts and the academic literature about them. Buyouts are initiated by "buyout funds", which are limited partnerships raised from mostly institutional investors. The funds earn returns for their investors by improving the operations of the firms they...