This paper studies the economic logic and pricing of secondary buyouts, a form of leveraged buyout that has become increasingly popular. I investigate three potential explanations for secondary buyouts: efficiency gains, liquidity-based market timing, and collusion. The results are most...

We study how access to private equity financing affects real firm activities using a broad panel of publicly traded U.S. firms that raise external equity through private placements (PIPEs) between 1995 and 2008. The public firms relying on PIPEs are generally small, high-tech firms that cannot...

This paper analyzes the role of foreign VCs in driving venture success in emerging markets. We analyze a comprehensive data set of 4753 portfolio companies from China. We test whether the presence of a foreign VC increases the likelihood that a portfolio company is successfully exited. We find...

In this study, we investigate financial distress risks of European companies around the buyout event in the period between 2000 and 2008. In addition, we analyze whether buyout companies go bankrupt more often than comparable non-buyout companies. Our results suggest that private equity...

This paper investigates the selling process of firms acquired by private equity versus strategic buyers. In a single regression setup we show that selling firms choose between formal auctions, controlled sales and private negotiations to fit their firm and deal characteristics including...

We show that the structure and pricing of debt in LBOs mostly depend on a single characteristic of the target firm, pre-LBO profitability. We find a positive relationship between pre-LBO profitability and deal leverage that is consistent with a dynamic trade-off theory of capital structure in...

We assess the recent economic and financial performance of U.K. private equity (PE) backed buyouts. Our empirical evidence, which is based on thousands of transactions, reveals that PE-backed buyouts achieved superior economic and financial performance in the period before and during the recent...

Using block share acquisitions made by private equity (PE) funds, we examine the sources of value gains in PE minority equity investments. We find that compared with non-PE acquirers, PE acquirers are more likely to place representatives with finance experience or those with experience in the...

We address whether the joint bidding by private equity consortiums facilitates collusion in the takeover market. We employ a sample of 870 takeovers of publicly traded targets in the 2003 to 2007 period, the time period which is the focus of investigation by the Justice Department and the source...

This paper sheds light on the impact that environmental, social and governance (ESG) corporate practice disclosure has on equity financing. We present a unique framed field experiment in which professional private equity investors competed in closed auctions to acquire fictive firms. We hence...