This paper focuses on funds of funds (FOFs) as a form of financial intermediation in private equity (both buyout and venture capital). After accounting for fees, FOFs provide returns equal to or above public market indices for both buyout and venture capital. While FOFs focusing on buyouts...

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...

Private equity has traditionally been thought to provide diversification benefits However, these benefits may be lower than anticipated. We find that private equity suffers from significant exposure to the same liquidity risk factor as public equity and other alternative asset classes. The...

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 study investigates the transition from being a listed company with a dispersed ownership structure to being a privately held company with a concentrated ownership structure. We consider a sample of private equity backed portfolio companies to evaluate the consequences of the corporate...

We are able to shed light on the black box of restructuring tools private equity investors use to improve the operational performance of their portfolio companies. By building on previous work considering performance evaluation of PE backed companies, we analyze whether private equity improves...

Using fund-, firm- and bank-level data we investigate the investments of private equity (PE) funds in the north-western regions of Italy. Both the private equity fund managers and the PE investments are heavily concentrated in this most developed area of the country. The average size of the...

Kathryn Judge of Columbia University documents how financial intermediaries persistently impose high fees compared to the value rendered, attributes this to political influence, and suggests countervailing policy strategies, including stoking competition and enhancing disclosure to reduce...

We collect ownership data of U.S. power plants accounting for 99% of U.S. electricity generation over the 2008-2020 period. Domestic listed corporations have reduced their ownership from 69% to 54% of total generation, while private equity, institutional investors, and foreign corporations have...