The paper investigates how Private Equity (PE) ownership influences out-performance of a high-growth firm, and whether it differs from the effect of two other important types of financial investors: banks and non-bank financial firms. We transform the levered return on equity into a unlevered...

Société Générale de Belgique was the world's first universal bank. It pioneered another innovation: investing in non-listed equity. We use hand-collected data to show that the bank earned significant positive risk-adjusted returns from 1850 to 1934. This offset its flat return on the listed...