This paper uses proprietary data from a leading intermediary to understand the magnitude and determinants of transaction costs in the secondary market for private equity stakes. Most transactions occur at a discount to net asset value. Buyers average an annualized public market equivalent of...

We document that defined benefit pension plans with significant holdings in private equity (PE) earn substantially greater returns than plans with small holdings in both the 1990s and the 2000s. A one standard deviation increase in PE holdings is associated with 4% greater returns per year. Up...

This is the first empirical paper investigating a comprehensive sample of listed (i.e. publicly traded) private equity companies, covering 287 companies in the time period 1986 to 2003. After imposing liquidity constraints, and after correcting for non-surviving vehicles, we get a sample of 114...

Private equity (PE) firms increasingly drift toward investing in software companies. In this paper, we empirically examine this trend and compare software drifts to general style drifts. We use an unbalanced panel of more than 7,000 PE firms that made investments between 1985 and 2020. Our...

Controversy rages about how to tax carried interest. One view sees carry as compensation that should be taxed like other labor income. Another sees carry as a reward for financial risk-taking that should be taxed like capital income. A third sees carry as creating a costly tax arbitrage. In this...

Private equity funds (PEFs) eliminate entity-level taxation by using pass-through entities. They further minimize their investors' tax liability by taking the position that profits distributed to both general partners (GPs) and limited partners (LPs) are passive portfolio investment income and...

We analyze the risk, return and cash flow characteristics of infrastructure investments by using a unique dataset of deals done by private equity-like investment funds. We show that infrastructure deals have a performance that is higher than that of noninfrastructure deals, despite lower default...

Although risk management has been a well-ploughed field in financial modeling for over three decades, the understanding how to correctly quantify and manage the risks of investing in private equity remains limited and continues to considerably lag that of other traditional asset classes. The...

This United States report responds to a questionnaire that the general reporter for the project prepared. The project describes United States law features of hedge funds, private equity funds and sovereign wealth funds and identifies critical current issues in their regulation and governance....

I propose a new investor sentiment measurement for the private equity market based on over 12,000 private equity deals from 68 countries over 1992 to 2012. The data indicate that institutional environments and firm-specific characteristics are both strong determinants of the private equity...