The effects of private equity buyouts on employment, productivity, and job reallocation vary tremendously with macroeconomic and credit conditions, across private equity groups, and by type of buyout. We reach this conclusion by examining the most extensive database of U.S. buyouts ever...

Despite the incentives of incumbent domestic listed corporations (DLCs) in the electricity generation industry, private equity, institutional investors, and foreign corporations have played an outsized role in financing the energy transition. These new entrants are twice as likely to create...

We evaluate the performance of limited partners' (LPs) private equity investments over time. Using a sample of 14,380 investments by 1,852 LPs in 1,250 buyout and venture funds started between 1991 and 2006, we find that the superior performance of endowment investors in the 1991-1998 period,...

A number of academic papers have indicated that returns for private equity funds, on average, have not outperformed public equities in the United States. This contradicts the risk premium one might expect with private equity, given the liquidity, transparency limitations, and additional...

Using a large sample of institutional investors' investments in private equity funds raised between 1991 and 2011, we estimate the extent to which investors' skill affects their returns. Bootstrap analyses show that the variance of actual performance is higher than would be expected by chance,...

Over the past two decades, private equity has contributed to a shrinking of the U.S. stock market. We develop a political economy model of private equity activity to study the wider economic consequences of this trend. We show that private and social incentives to delist firms from the stock...

In this paper, I extend the results of Moskowitz and Vissing-Jørgensen (2002) on the returns to entrepreneurial investments in the United States. First, following the authors' methodology I replicate the original findings from the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) for the period 1989 - 1998 and...

This paper addresses the problem of accurately determining buyout opportunity cost of capital for performance analyses. It draws on a unique and proprietary set of data on 133 United States buyouts between 1984 and 2004. For each buyout, we determine a public market equivalent that matches the...

We examine the role private equity (PE) firms play in the resolution of financial distress using a sample of 2,151 firms that borrow in the leveraged loan market between 1997 and 2010. Controlling for leverage, PE-backed firms are no more likely to default than other leveraged loan borrowers....