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...

We investigate whether a firm’s disclosure policy is affected by the changing corporate setting and intensified corporate governance associated with private equity (PE) investments. For a unique sample of unquoted PE backed firms we observe a significant switch to increased financial...