We survey 79 private equity (PE) investors with combined assets under management of more than $750 billion about their practices in firm valuation, capital structure, governance, and value creation. Investors rely primarily on internal rates of return and multiples to evaluate investments. Their...

This paper compares board and director characteristics of reverse leveraged buyout (LBO) firms controlled by LBO specialists to those of an industry- and size-matched comparison sample. We consider the boards of the reverse LBOs to be value-maximizing because of the strong incentives the LBO...

Based on two samples of high quality personality data for chief executive officers (CEOs), we use linguistic features extracted from conferences calls and statistical learning techniques to develop a measure of CEO personality in terms of the Big Five traits: agreeableness, conscientiousness,...

We survey more than 200 private equity (PE) managers from firms with $1.9 trillion of assets under management (AUM) about their portfolio performance, decision-making and activities during the COVID-19 pandemic. Given that PE managers have significant incentives to maximize value, their actions...

Most research on the CEO labor market has studied public company CEOs while largely ignoring the market for CEOs in private equity funded companies. We fill this gap by studying the market for CEOs among larger U.S. companies (enterprise value greater than $1 billion) purchased by private equity...

This paper compares the market value of highly leveraged transactions (HLTs) to the discounted value of their corresponding cash flow forecasts. These forecasts are provided by management to investors and shareholders in 51 HLTs completed between 1983 and 1989. Our estimates of discounted cash...

SUBJECT AREAS: Business Valuation, Financial Forecasting, Strategic Analysis.CASE SETTING: 1996, U.S.In the Spring of 1996 Berg Electronics is poised to become a publicly traded company after going through a quot;build-upquot; leveraged buyout by Hicks, Muse, Tate, and Furst (HMTF). HMTF...

We survey over 1,000 institutional and corporate venture capitalists (VCs) at more than 900 different firms to learn how their decisions and investments have been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. We compare their survey answers to those provided by a large sample of VCs in early 2016 and...

Private equity funds hold assets that are hard to value. Managers may have an incentive to distort reported valuations if these are used by investors to decide on commitments to subsequent funds managed by the same firm. Using a large dataset of buyout and venture funds, we test for the presence...

Using a dataset of 2,603 executive assessments with thirty individual characteristics, we identify who becomes a CEO candidate and how CEO candidates differ from candidates for other top- management positions, notably CFOs. The variation in characteristics is explained by four factors that we...