Despite the incentives of incumbent domestic listed corporations (DLCs) in the electricity generation industry, private equity, institutional investors, and foreign corporations have played an outsized role in financing the energy transition. These new entrants are twice as likely to create...

Most research on the CEO labor market studies public company CEOs while largely ignoring CEOs in private equity (PE) funded companies. We fill this gap by studying the market for CEOs among U.S. companies purchased by PE firms in large leveraged buyout transactions. 71% of those companies hired...

General Partners (GPs) in private equity face a trade-off between focusing their skills and effort on fewer investments to earn higher returns, or investing more broadly to reduce risk through diversification. Using a novel, deal-level dataset of 5,925 global investments from 1999 to 2016, we...

Infrastructure assets have undergone substantial privatization in recent decades. How do different types of owners target and manage these assets? And does the contract form--control rights (concession) vs. outright ownership (sale)--matter? We explore these questions in the context of global...

From 2010 to 2021, 639 US VC-funded firms achieved unicorn status. We investigate why there are so many unicorns and why controlling shareholders give investors privileges to obtain unicorn status. We show that unicorns rely more than other VC-funded firms on organizational capital as well as...

Despite its large and increasing size in the U.S. and Europe, there is relatively little research on the private debt (PD) market, particularly compared to the bank and syndicated loan markets. Accordingly, in this paper, we survey U.S. and European investors with private debt assets under...

Institutional investors conduct more governance research and are less likely to follow proxy advisor vote recommendations when a company's bonds comprise a larger share of their assets. These findings are driven by bond holdings, shareholder proposals, and companies where fixed-income managers...

Passively managed funds have grown to become some of the largest shareholders in publicly traded companies, but there is considerable debate about the effects of this growth on corporate governance. The goal of this paper is to review the literature on the governance implications of passive fund...

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...