For years, research has been conducted to correctly model and predict the risk and return structures of Private Equity (PE) funds. Although past research has revealed valuable insight into the features of those funds, most risk and return model struggle with the dispersion of PE funds' returns,...

This paper uses highly detailed administrative records from the Norwegian Tax Authority to provide direct measures of the returns from investing in newly established, innovative companies. We trace out the entire funding and pricing histories of each firm and study performance measures at the...

We investigate whether access to information prior to an IPO generates a trading advantage after the IPO. We find that limited partners (LPs) of venture capital funds obtain high returns when they invest in newly listed stocks backed by their funds. These returns are not explained by LPs'...

This research applies findings from the field of factor investing to address the question of what drives private equity deal returns. I provide empirical evidence that the most comprehensively documented factor anomalies have explanatory power of cross sectional variations in returns of private...

We measure the aggregate return to all equity investors in various funding rounds of a venture company with the founders' investments valued at their first-round pre-money valuations. We examine 17,242 ventures that had their first funding rounds during 1980 and 2006 and follow them till their...

We explain the returns obtained on venture capital (VC) investments in all VC backed companies going public in the U.S. between 2003 and 2017. Using a unique data set of 1,921 investor-IPO returns, we show that later investments obtain higher returns, even after controlling for observed and...

We analyze the relationship between contracts and returns in private equity (PE) investments. Contractual control in the form of covenants tends to be employed to identify good deals. Better quality firms are more likely to have covenant-rich contracts, as they are less concerned by the...

For alternative assets such as venture capital, buyouts (private equity), real estate, etc., the standard regression of portfolio returns on market returns to measure risk produces risk measures that are not credible. Institutional investors, doubting such measures, instead often use either some...

Uncertainty about manager skill and diversification constraints are hallmarks of investing in alternative assets. This paper quantifies the utility losses to private equity investors arising from these frictions. When calibrated to the data on institutional allocations to private equity and...

In this paper, we find evidence of reversals in relative exit performance between the "short" and "long-run" in the VC market, with the short-run defined to be the first five years of business, and the long-run, the sixth year of business onwards. Using proxies for the risk of venture capital...