Most of the existing research on value creation drivers in private equity buyouts is restricted to the US and the UK, whereas continental European countries are not included. In addition, most of the generally applied methods for measuring the importance of different value creation drivers do...

In this paper we investigate the effects of debt usage on (risk-adjusted) equity returns in private equity-backed buyout transactions. We use a proprietary data set of more than 700 realized European and North American buyouts acquired between 1990 and 2006 to empirically assess theoretical...