We present conclusive evidence on the performance of private equity, using a high quality dataset of fund cash flows that covers about 85 percent of capital ever raised by U.S. buyout funds. For almost all vintage years since 1980, U.S. buyout funds have significantly outperformed the S&P 500....

We develop a new method to estimate private equity funds' market beta from cash flows. Our methodology extends the widely known public market equivalent calculation to a cross-sectional regression. By simply regressing funds' internal rates of return on their paired market internal rates of...

We document that defined benefit pension plans with significant holdings in private equity (PE) earn substantially greater returns than plans with small holdings in both the 1990s and the 2000s. A one standard deviation increase in PE holdings is associated with 4% greater returns per year. Up...

Past performance is considered one of the most salient, reliable indicators of future performance. For this reason, when considering making investments, investors typically focus on opportunities that have, on average, shown high net returns in the past. In many markets where there is extreme...

This paper investigates under what circumstances boards of directors fire CEOs and whether this action leads to better firm performance. We use unique and detailed data, covering 473 companies in the transition region, on boards’ actions, expectations and beliefs about CEO ability. We find...

This paper investigates determinants and consequences of net asset value discounts in listed private equity funds. Listed private equity funds share characteristics of closed-end mutual funds and traditional unlisted private equity funds and can therefore offer insights into both. Our results...

We test under what circumstances boards discipline managers and whether such interventions improve performance. We exploit exogenous variation due to the staggered adoption of corporate governance laws in formerly Communist countries coupled with detailed ‘hard’ information about the...

Financial advisors play an important role in M&A transactions. Private equity (PE) firms, in turn, are highly sought-after clients for financial advisors as they promise lucrative business due to their frequent engagements in acquisitions. We find that PE firms pay, on average, less for...

The Pepperdine Private Capital Markets Project survey for business owners, administered during the spring of 2010, reveals an increasingly important role of friends and family (Friends/Family) to provide capital for privately-held businesses. Examining business owners’ perceptions of their...

In this paper, we present a new approach to measure the returns of private equity investments based on a stochastic model of the dynamics of a private equity fund. Our stochastic model of a private equity fund consists of two independent stages: the stochastic model of the capital drawdowns and...