Over the past two decades, private equity has contributed to a shrinking of the U.S. stock market. We develop a political economy model of private equity activity to study the wider economic consequences of this trend. We show that private and social incentives to delist firms from the stock...

The media often cast foreign private equity firms as villains who gamble with local jobs. We use detailed registry data from Sweden to show that foreign buyouts have not affected workers' labor market outcomes. But domestic buyouts have. They have increased unemployment incidence by a fifth,...

We examine the determinants of private equity returns using a newly constructed database of 7,500investments worldwide over forty years. The median investment IRR (PME) is 21% (1.3), gross offees. One in ten investments goes bankrupt, whereas one in four has an IRR above 50%. Only one ineight...

Private equity firms increasingly sell companies to each other in secondary buyouts (SBOs). We examine commonly expressed concerns regarding SBOs using novel and unique datasets. SBOs made by buyers under pressure to spend capital (a minority of transactions) underperform and destroy value for...

Private equity owned firms have more leverage, more intense compensation contracts, and higher productivity than comparable firms. We develop a theory of buyouts in oligopolistic markets that explains these facts. Private equity firms are more aggressive in inducing restructuring compared to...

Do foreign venture capitalists help the domestic economy, or hamper it by slowing down growth, potentially moving economic activity away? This paper addresses this long-standing policy question by examining the differential effects of US venture capital investments on the growth of Swedish...

Using linked employer-employee data from Sweden, a difference-in-difference approach, and 201 private equity buyouts undertaken between 1998 and 2004, we show that unemployment risk declines and labor income increases for employees in the wake of a private equity buyout. Unemployment risk...

We survey the literature on venture capital and institutions and present a case study comparing the development of the venture capital market in the US to Sweden. Our literature survey underscores that the legal environment, financial market development, the tax system, labor market regulations,...

The creation and scaling of startups are associated with risk-taking and different types of owners treat these risks differently. We show how an active venture capital (VC) market affects risk-taking in research and scaling decisions of startups. VC-backed startups will choose more high-risk,...