Are private equity fund managers that earn persistently higher returns truly skilled, or are they just lucky? Using a novel approach that overcomes concerns about the integrity of both the data and the empirical methods that have been commonly used in prior studies of private equity persistence...

Using a large sample of institutional investors' investments in private equity funds raised between 1991 and 2011, we estimate the extent to which investors' skill affects their returns. Bootstrap analyses show that the variance of actual performance is higher than would be expected by chance,...

This paper examines the determinants of private equity activity across Europe. We analyze a total of 43 explanatory variables, categorized into six groups: Economy; Finance and capital markets; Quality of institutions; Life quality; Economic freedom and Globalization. We assess their impact on...

Uncertainty about manager skill and diversification constraints are hallmarks of investing in alternative assets. This paper quantifies the utility losses to private equity investors arising from these frictions. When calibrated to the data on institutional allocations to private equity and...

Compensation of private equity fund managers typically consists of a fixed management fee and a performance related carried interest which entitles managers to option-like payoffs. We consider whether this structure tends to reward excessive risk-taking rather than managerial skill. Our model of...

We compare a number of widely used trend-cycle decompositions of output in a formal Bayesian model comparison exercise. This is motivated by the often markedly different results from these decompositions — different decompositions have broad implications for the relative importance of real...

This paper provides an underlying reason for why recent Bayesian trend-cycle decompositions of U.S. real GDP differ despite using identical unobserved components models. We stress that a pitfall in estimating unobserved components models accounts for the divergence in the empirical conclusions....

Reporting point estimates and error bands for structural vector autoregressions that are only set identified is a very common practice. However, unless the researcher is persuaded on the basis of prior information that some parameter values are more plausible than others, this common practice...

Reporting point estimates and error bands for structural vector autoregressions that are only set identified is a very common practice. However, unless the researcher is persuaded on the basis of prior information that some parameter values are more plausible than others, this common practice...

Reporting point estimates and error bands for structural vector autoregressions that are only set identified is a very common practice. However, unless the researcher is persuaded on the basis of prior information that some parameter values are more plausible than others, this common practice...