This study considers the trade-off between better top management team (TMT) decision-making involving complementary perspectives and inefficiencies due to conflicts between individuals. In analyzing characteristics of 1,071 fund partners involved in 1,295 buyout deals by 117 funds, we find that...

Despite an increasing importance of secondary buyouts in the private equity market, little is known about the perspective of the seller and his motives for choosing this exit type. Do private equity firms have a clear pecking order regarding the exit channels for their portfolio companies? Is a...

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...

This paper is the first systematic analysis of the impact of diversification on the performance of private equity funds. A unique data set allows the exact evaluation of diversification across the dimensions financing stages, industries, and countries. Very different levels of diversification...

Limited partners (LPs) of private equity funds commit to invest with extreme levels of illiquidity and significant uncertainty regarding the timing of capital flows. Secondary markets have emerged which alleviate some of the associated cost. This paper develops a subjective valuation model...

We review the theory and evidence on venture capital (VC) and other private equity: why professional private equity exists, what private equity managers do with their portfolio companies, what returns they earn, who earns more and why, what determines the design of contracts signed between (i)...

This study analyses the role of private equity backing in initial public offerings (IPOs) using a dataset of 227 companies that went public on the Milan Stock Exchange between January 1995 and December 2007. The evidence rejects the certification and monitoring hypotheses and provides...

EV/EBITDA multiple expansion in Private Equity (PE) transactions strongly influences deal returns. As multiple expansion is the result of deal pricing differences between entry and exit, this paper attempts to shed light on how relative deal pricing influences multiple expansion and deal...

This paper explores whether private equity firms that are new to the industry take excessive risks relative to funds from established firms. We use differences between the implicit incentives of managers of experienced and of novice funds as identification strategy. We find that novice funds...

This paper provides an introduction to buyouts and the academic literature about them. Buyouts are initiated by “buyout funds”, which are limited partnerships raised from mostly institutional investors. The funds earn returns for their investors by improving the operations of the firms they...