Private equity owned firms have more leverage, more intense compensation contracts, and higher productivity than comparable firms. We develop a theory of buyouts in oligopolistic markets that explains these facts. Private equity firms are more aggressive in inducing restructuring compared to...

Over the past two decades, private equity has contributed to a shrinking of the U.S. stock market. We develop a political economy model of private equity activity to study the wider economic consequences of this trend. We show that private and social incentives to delist firms from the stock...

In this paper we construct a model in which entrepreneurial innovations are sold into oligopolistic industries and where adverse selection problems between entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and incumbents are present. We show that as exacerbated development by better-informed venture-backed...

Startups face a trade-off between short-term profitability versus long-term growth where investors tolerate prolonged financial losses. We present a new theory and empirical evidence about the existence and shape of so-called J-curves. The theory predicts that investors facing better exit...

We develop a theory of commercialization mode (entry or sale) of entrepreneurial inventions into oligopoly, and show that an invention of higher quality is more likely to be sold (or licensed) to an incumbent due to strategic product market effects on the sales price. Moreover, preemptive...

Commentators on the private equity industry often claim that favorable tax treatment gives private equity firms advantages in the market for corporate control. But we show that tax advantages do not affect the equilibrium ownership of corporate assets when acquisition costs are fully deductible...

An increasingly large share of cross-border acquisitions are undertaken by private equity-firms (PE-firms) and not by traditional multinational enterprises (MNEs). We propose a model of crossborder acquisitions in which MNEs and PE-firms compete over domestic assets. MNEs' advantage lies in...