We examine the determinants of private equity returns using a newly constructed database of 7,500investments worldwide over forty years. The median investment IRR (PME) is 21% (1.3), gross offees. One in ten investments goes bankrupt, whereas one in four has an IRR above 50%. Only one ineight...

This study presents a dynamic model for the private equity market in which information revelation and uncertainty rationally explain the cyclical pattern of investment flows into private equity. The net benefit of private equity over public equity is i) uncertain and ii) agents have private...

We study the role of private equity firms in cross-border mergers and acquisitions. We find that private equity-owned firms are more likely to become targets in crossborderM&A transactions. This effect is particularly strong in transactions where the target or its shareholders actively reach out...

Contemporary financial stochastic programs typically involve a trade-offbetween return and (downside)-risk. Using stochastic programming we characterize analytically (rather than numerically) the optimal decisions that follow from characteristic single-stage and multi-stage versions of such...

Recent research reveals that hedge fund returns exhibit a range of different,possibly non-linear pay-off patterns. It is difficult to qualify all these patternssimultaneously as being rational in a traditional framework for optimal financial decisionmaking. In this paper we present a simple...

Regulators often set value-at-risk (VaR) constraints to limit the portfolio risk of institutional investors. For some investors, notably pension funds, the VaR constraint is enforced over a horizon which is significantly shorter than the investment horizon of the investor. Our paper aims to...

We analyze earnings forecasts retrieved from the I/B/E/S database concerning 596 firms for the sample 1995 to 2011, with a specific focus on whether these earnings forecasts can be predicted from available data. Our main result is that earnings forecasts can be predicted quite accurately using...

An analysis of about 300000 earnings forecasts, created by 18000 individual forecasters for earnings of over 300 S&P listed firms, shows that these forecasts are predictable to a large extent using a statistical model that includes publicly available information. When we focus on the...

We study the effects of a bank’s engagement in trading. Traditional banking is relationship-based: not scalable, long-term oriented, with high implicit capital, and low risk (thanks to the law of large numbers). Trading is transactions-based: scalable, short-term, capital constrained, and with...

We analyze a publicly-traded firm's decision to stay public or go private when managerial autonomy from shareholder intervention affects the supply of productive inputs by management. We show that both the advantage and the disadvantage of public ownership relative to private ownership lie in...