The fastest growing segment of private equity deals are secondary buyouts - sales from one PE fund to another. Using a comprehensive sample of leveraged buyouts we investigate whether SBOs are value-maximizing, or reflect opportunistic behavior. To proxy for adverse incentives, we develop buy...

We exploit the arrival of industry-wide synergistic merger waves to identify whether classifiedboards deter takeover bids. In a stylized model, we show that when target classified boards arecostly to bidders, their negative effect on takeover likelihood is more pronounced during mergerwaves....