The present study looks at a range of questions related to the social and economic consequences of private equity/LBO activity raised by the European Parliament. Overall, we find private equity to be a well-functioning, established industry that fulfils a crucial role in our economy by providing...

The hedge fund industry has risen in 2007 to the top of the international political agenda, yet the debate surrounding it is limited by a lack of understanding of how the industry functions, or even how it is to be defined. The industry consists largely of investment funds operating from...

We analyse the potentially vulnerable and systemically relevant financial intermediation chain established by hedge funds and prime brokers. Our dataset covers the 306 largest global hedge funds and their prime brokers over the period July 2001 to December 2011. The study illustrates that hedge...

We study the relative effect of venture capital and bank finance on large manufacturing firms in local U.S. markets. Theory predicts that with venture capital, the firm size distribution should become more stretched-out to the right, but it’s ambiguous on the effect of banks on large firms....

It has often been argued during the recent credit crisis that commercial banks’ involvement in investment banking activities might have had an impact on the intensity of their underwriting standards. We turn to evidence from the period prior to the complete revocation of the Glass-Steagall Act...

This paper aims at analysing the mortality patterns of hedge funds over the period January 1994 to May 2008. In particular, we investigate the extent to which a spillover of risk among hedge funds through redemptions and failures of other funds has affected the probability of fund failure. We...