Private Equity

With the increasing risk of a recessionary market environment, many investors are asking themselves what impact economic cycles have on the private equity industry.

With the increasing risk of a recessionary market environment, many investors are asking themselves what impact economic cycles have on the private equity industry.

The private equity secondaries market has evolved from a niche segment into a crucial $100+ billion marketplace, representing approximately 10% of global private equity transactions. Yet, despite this growth, significant challenges remain in asset selection and pricing. This article demonstrates how artificial intelligence (AI) - particularly machine learning and natural language processing - is revolutionizing secondaries investing by uncovering predictive signals hidden in qualitative data that traditional metrics miss. Groundbreaking research examining thousands of GP reports across multiple funds reveals how the “tone” of management communications can predict future performance more accurately than conventional metrics alone. For investors navigating the complex secondaries market, embracing AI-driven approaches to augment human judgement is rapidly becoming not just an advantage but a necessity for sustainable competitive edge.

We assemble a proprietary dataset of 395 private equity (PE) fund prospectuses to analyze fund performance and fundraising success. We analyze both quantitative and qualitative information contained in these documents using econometric methods and machine learning techniques. PE fund performance is unrelated to quantitative information, such as prior performance, and measures of document readability. Measures of fundraising success, in contrast, are correlated to most fund characteristics but are not related to future performance. Meanwhile, machine learning tools can use qualitative information to predict future fund performance: the performance spread between the funds within the top and bottom terciles of predicted probability of success is about 25%. Our findings support the view that in opaque and non-standardized markets, investors fail to incorporate qualitative information in their asset manager selection process, but do incorporate salient quantitative information.

Analyzing a large sample of gross fund-level and deal-level returns in Private Equity (PE), we study systematic differences in investment skills across PE firms and what investors can learn about the true skill of PE firms from past performance. We extend the framework of Korteweg and Sorensen (2017) and establish a flexible variance decomposition model that estimates heterogeneity in returns, idiosyncratic risk-taking, and default risk. Our results show that investment skills are systematically different across PE firms with an estimated interquartile spread of returns ranging from 23% to 26% for deals and 17% to 21% for funds, relative to the market. Further, we find significant heterogeneity in idiosyncratic risk and default risk, but higher idiosyncratic variation does not explain higher expected returns. Since returns inherit substantial noise and spurious correlations from overlapping investments, investors require a considerable number of observations to learn about the true skill of PE firms.

This study investigates the effects of economic cycles on abnormal value creation of buyouts (BO) and on the investment activity of the corresponding Private Equity (PE) funds. We benchmark a large sample of BO transactions with closely matched public companies from 1986 to 2017. Our results show that BO transactions have created significantly more value overall, but abnormal value creation has disappeared in more recent periods. However, BO transactions are considerably less sensitive to adverse shocks in the real economy than their public counterparts. The adverse impact of a 1% increased exposure to economic distress is between 0.4% and 0.5% lower for BO than for public benchmarks. Using the quarterly cash-flow data of the corresponding PE funds, we find that investment activity of initial fund flows is slightly pro-cyclical, while reinvestment activity is highly countercyclical to the real economy. Our results imply that PE funds act as liquidity providers during economic distress by providing 45% to 49% more capital to their existing portfolio companies than in undistressed periods.

Understanding value creation at the transaction level is at the heart of explaining private equity (PE) returns. Taking advantage of a proprietary sample of 2,029 international buyout deals executed between 1984 and 2013 we provide detailed evidence on financial, market and operational value creation drivers. Additionally, we unravel the differences in value creation between regions, industries, transaction sizes and over time, providing limited and general partners with the opportunity to compare their past transactions with those of their respective peer groups.

Investors increasingly look for private equity managers to provide opportunities for co-investing outside the fund structure, thereby saving fees and carried interest payments. In this paper we use a large sample of buyout and venture capital co-investments to test how such deals compare with the remaining fund investments. In contrast to Fang, Ivashina and Lerner (2015) we find no evidence of adverse selection. Gross return distributions of co-investments and other deals are similar. Co-investments generally have lower costs to investors. We simulate net returns to investors and demonstrate how reasonably sized portfolios of co-investments significantly out-perform fund returns.

We use investment-level data to study performance persistence in venture capital (VC). Consistent with prior studies, we find that each additional initial public offering (IPO) among a VC firm’s first ten investments predicts as much as an 8% higher IPO rate on its subsequent investments, though this effect erodes with time. In exploring its sources, we document several additional facts: successful outcomes stem in large part from investing in the right places at the right times; VC firms do not persist in their ability to choose the right places and times to invest; but early success does lead to investing in later rounds and in larger syndicates. This pattern of results seems most consistent with the idea that initial success improves access to deal flow. That preferential access raises the quality of subsequent investments, perpetuating performance differences in initial investments.