[Despite the central importance of investors to all initial public offering (IPO) theories, relatively little is known about their role in practice. This article is based on a survey of how institutional investors assess IPOs, what information they provide to the investment banking syndicate, and the factors they believe influence allocations. We find that investor characteristics, in particular brokerage relationships with the bookrunner, are perceived to be the most important factors influencing allocations, which supports the view that IPO allocations are part of implicit quid pro quo deals with investment banks. The survey raises doubts as to the extent of information production or revelation]

We examine the costs and benefits of the global integration of initial public offering (IPO) markets associated with the diffusion of U.S. underwriting methods in the 1990s. Bookbuilding is becoming increasingly popular outside the United States and typically costs twice as much as a fixed-price offer. However, on its own, bookbuilding only leads to lower underpricing when conducted by U.S. banks and/or targeted at U.S. investors. For most issuers, the gains associated with lower underpricing outweighed the additional costs associated with hiring U.S. banks or marketing in the United States. This suggests a quality/price trade-off contrasting with the findings of Chen and Ritter, particularly since non-U.S. issuers raising US20 million-US80 million also typically pay a 7% spread when U.S. banks and investors are involved.

ABSTRACT Using a novel data set linking private equity (PE) deals to individual managers, we document evidence of manager skill in terms of generating net present value (NPV), a performance measure that captures both scale and returns. PE firms have strong economic incentives to raise larger funds and execute larger deals. While relative returns decline with scale, NPV persists and even increases. Skilled managers are entrusted with more capital and achieve better career outcomes, and approximately 40% of NPV is attributable to internal capital allocation decisions. These findings highlight the role of PE firms in creating value through performance‐based capital deployment.

ABSTRACT This paper examines the impact of a major change in dividend taxation introduced in the United Kingdom in July 1997. The reform was structured in such a way that the immediate impact fell almost entirely on the largest investor class in the United Kingdom, namely pension funds. We find significant changes in the valuation of dividend income after the reform, in particular for high‐yielding companies. These results provide strong support for the hypothesis that taxation affects the valuation of companies, and that pension funds were the effective marginal investors for high‐yielding companies.

This article uses clinical evidence to show how the German system of corporate control and governance is both more active and more hostile than has previously been suggested. It provides a complete breakdown of ownership and takeover defence patterns in German listed companies and finds highly fragmented (but not dispersed) ownership in non-majority controlled firms. We document how the accumulation of hostile stakes can be used to gain control of target companies given these ownership patterns. The article also suggests an important role for banks in helping predators accumulate, and avoid the disclosure of, large stakes.

Despite the central importance of investors to all initial public offering (IPO) theories, relatively little is known about their role in practice. This article is based on a survey of how institutional investors assess IPOs, what information they provide to the investment banking syndicate, and the factors they believe influence allocations. We find that investor characteristics, in particular brokerage relationships with the bookrunner, are perceived to be the most important factors influencing allocations, which supports the view that IPO allocations are part of implicit quid pro quo deals with investment banks. The survey raises doubts as to the extent of information production or revelation.

How and when to exit portfolio company investments are critical choices facing private equity funds. In this paper we analyze 1022 European private equity exits, using information on fund and portfolio company characteristics, and on conditions in capital markets. For over 43% of the exits, private equity funds sold to each other and we analyze why such secondary buyouts have gained in popularity relative to IPOs and sales to corporate acquirers. We find that the exit route depends on various portfolio company characteristics, and that conditions in the debt and equity markets have a strong influence on exit choice. The existing literature has tended to portray the IPO is the “preferred” exit route. However, our analysis suggests this is mistaken: private equity funds take advantage of ‘windows of opportunity’, and the exit route that maximizes value varies with market conditions.

This paper presents new evidence on performance persistence for U.S. private equity (buyout and venture capital) funds. We use high quality cash-flow data from Burgiss's large sample of institutional investors (as of December 2020) which allows us to examine how persistence has changed over more than three decades of fundraising. Venture capital (VC) performance remains remarkably persistent across funds raised by the same general partner (GP). In contrast, buyout funds' performance persistence becomes noticeably weaker over time. The patterns are different when we restrict the analysis to information that would have been available to investors – interim performance on the previous fund at the time a new fund is raised – rather than using final, or latest, performance. We find little evidence of persistence for buyouts, especially post-2000. We continue to find persistence for VC funds though it declines post-2000. The differences are driven by interim performance reported at the time of fundraising being only moderately correlated to final performance and GPs avoiding fundraising when interim performance is poor. Finally, we look at GPs who introduce new fund styles and find that performance is noticeably lower for buyouts (but not VC). Exploring the reasons for these divergent trends in persistence between buyout and VC is a promising area for future research.

While previous research has characterized the key features of contracts between entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, little is known about the contracts' evolution over time and across funding rounds. We overcome significant data challenges to compile a novel panel dataset of U.S. early-stage ventures that includes the main financial and control rights offered to investors at each (equity) funding round. We find that there is a ‘default contract’ with a distinct combination of rights that the majority of companies gravitate to. This default contract is typically implemented in the initial Series A funding round and rarely deviated from in later rounds. Whenever deviations do occur, terms are usually revised in favour of investors, and not entrepreneurs. Due to this stickiness of the default contract, for successful startups we argue that post-money valuations in later rounds can be a reasonable proxy for the economic value of the firm.

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 outperform fund returns.