Private equity funds pay particular attention to capital structure when executing leveraged buyouts, creating an interesting setting for examining capital structure theories. Using a large, detailed, international sample of buyouts from 1980-2008, we find that buyout leverage is unrelated to the...

Relative pay in the financial sector has experienced an extraordinary increase over the last few decades. A proposed explanation for this pattern has been that the demand for skilled workers in finance has risen more than in other sectors. We use Swedish administrative data, which include...

The Mexico-United States border region comprises one of the most dynamic and complex industrial areas in the world. The region is characterized by high population growth and increasing urbanization and industrialization, all of which is taking place in a context of rapid political and economic...

A long-standing controversy is whether LBOs relieve managers from short-term pressures from public shareholders, or whether LBO funds themselves are driven by short-term profit motives and sacrifice long-term growth to boost short-term performance. We investigate 495 transactions with a focus on...

Private equity funds are important to the economy, yet there is little analysis explaining their financial structure. In our model the financial structure minimizes agency conflicts between fund managers and investors. Relative to financing each deal separately, raising a fund where the manager...

We study how firm characteristics evolve from early business plan to initial public offering to public company for 49 venture capital financed companies. The average time elapsed is almost 6 years. We describe the financial performance, business idea, point(s) of differentiation, non-human...

I develop and estimate a model of cash auction bankruptcy using data on 205 Swedish firms. The results challenge arguments that cash auctions, as compared to reorganizations, are immune to conflicts of interest between claimholders but lead to inefficient liquidations. I show that a sale of the...