Over the last decade, the going private market has experienced a considerable boom in size and also has become more interesting for private equity investors that are looking to partner with incumbent management. This offers managers the choice to take the firm private themselves in a traditional...

This study investigates the transition from being a listed company with a dispersed ownership structure to being a privately held company with a concentrated ownership structure. We consider a sample of private equity backed portfolio companies to evaluate the consequences of the corporate...

We are able to shed light on the black box of restructuring tools private equity investors use to improve the operational performance of their portfolio companies. By building on previous work considering performance evaluation of PE backed companies, we analyze whether private equity improves...

Private equity has become an increasingly important part of our economy. Around the world the companies owned by private equity investors account for a substantial percentage of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and private sector employment. These investors have recently been under fire in the media...

The development of theory about private equity during the last decades follows the pattern of economic development. While buyouts have found their origin in restructuring we observe more recently a trend of facilitating growth, where the firm and financier follow a path of acquisitions. A...

A considerable number of studies have examined the relationship between corporate governance (CG) structures and corporate performance (e.g., Yermack, 1996; Gompers et al., 2003; Beiner et al., 2006; Renders et al., 2010; Ntim et al., 2012; Kumar & Zattoni 2013; Griffin, et al., 2014). In contrast, despite its...

The rise of private equity funds represents a new stage in capitalism. These funds combine financial resources and capital markets expertise with detailed operational knowledge of the operations of takeover targets to maximize the creation and expropriation of value on behalf of investors. Their...

Using a parsimonious measure of investor protection constructed from fund organizational characteristics, this paper documents that companies targeted by activists with better investor protection structures outperform those targeted by poor-investor-protection activists by roughly 10% per year....

In this paper I test the proposition put forward by private equity players that they undertake “governance arbitrage”. This proposition suggests that public companies with weak governance are more likely to receive a buyout bid from a private equity (PE) firm.I find evidence that companies...