There is an ambivalent discussion about the performance of secondary buyouts (SBOs): Private equity (PE) sponsors often assume an underperformance of SBOs compared to primary buyouts (PBOs). However, the share of SBOs grew significantly to more than 50 percent of all buyouts in 2018. This paper...

Private Equity ("PE") investors are exposed to asymmetric information during their fund manager selection process. This paper evaluates several ways public pension funds ("PF"), the largest capital provider to PE funds, deal with this information asymmetry. Investors with specialist PE...

Measures of private equity performance based on cash flows do not account for a discount-rate risk premium that is a component of CAPM alpha. We create secondary market PE indices and find that PE discount rates vary considerably. NAVs are too smooth because they fail to reflect variation in...

We propose a methodology to evaluate private equity investments by using investor-specific stochastic discount factors. The methodology allows a direct way of decomposing an investor's private-equity return into a risk-compensation and an "alpha". It also helps determine whether a given investor...

Private equity (PE) firms increasingly drift toward investing in software companies. In this paper, we empirically examine this trend and compare software drifts to general style drifts. We use an unbalanced panel of more than 7,000 PE firms that made investments between 1985 and 2020. Our...

The authors perform an original research on the fundamentals of winning virtuous strategies creation toward the leveraged buyout transactions implementation during the private equity investment in the conditions of the resonant absorption of discrete information in the diffusion-type financial...

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...

We study the liquidity properties of private equity cash flows using data from 837 buyout and venture capital funds from 1984-2010. Most cash flow variation at a point in time is diversifiable – either idiosyncratic to a given fund or explained by the fund's age. Both capital calls and...