Understanding value creation at the transaction level is at the heart of explaining private equity (PE) returns. Taking advantage of a proprietary sample of 2,029 international buyout deals executed between 1984 and 2013 we provide detailed evidence on financial, market and operational value...

EV/EBITDA multiple expansion in Private Equity (PE) transactions strongly influences deal returns. As multiple expansion is the result of deal pricing differences between entry and exit, this paper attempts to shed light on how relative deal pricing influences multiple expansion and deal...

Private equity (PE) firms increasingly drift toward investing in software companies. In this paper, we empirically examine this trend and compare software drifts to general style drifts. We use an unbalanced panel of more than 7,000 PE firms that made investments between 1985 and 2020. Our...

Most of the existing research on value creation drivers in private equity buyouts is restricted to the US and the UK, whereas continental European countries are not included. In addition, most of the generally applied methods for measuring the importance of different value creation drivers do...

This paper investigates the relationship between leverage and returns in private equity buyout transactions. In contrast to the predictions of traditional capital structure theory, we find that transactions financed with large amounts of debt are associated higher transaction prices and lower...