Due to imperfect transparency and costly auditing, trust is an essentialcomponent of financial intermediation. In this paper we study acomprehensive sample of due diligence reports from a major hedge funddue diligence firm. A routine feature of due diligence is an assessmentof integrity. We find...

We introduce a methodology to estimate the historical time series of returns to investment in private equity. The approach is quite general, requires only an unbalanced panel of cash contributions and distributions accruing to limited partners, and is robust to sparse data. We decompose private...

We introduce a methodology to estimate the historical time series of returns to investment in private equity. The approach is quite general, requires only an unbalanced panel of cash contributions and distributions accruing to limited partners, and is robust to sparse data. We decompose private...

A firm's book equity is a measure of the value held by a firm's ordinary shareholders. Increasingly, it is being reported as a negative number. Because a firm's limited liability structure means that shareholders cannot have negative value, negative book equity has no obvious interpretation....