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.

ABSTRACT This study analyzes whether fair value estimates of fund net asset values (NAVs) produced by private equity managers are accurate and unbiased predictors of future discounted cash flows (DCFs). We exploit the fact that private equity funds have finite lives to compare reported NAVs to DCFs based on realized cash flows for 384 Venture Capital (VC) funds and 195 Buyout funds spanning 1988–2016. Findings reveal that Buyout funds' NAVs display little systematic bias, but VC funds' NAVs are relatively aggressively biased compared to Buyout funds, especially since 2000. Accuracy is worse in the first half of the sample period even though NAV estimates generally are more conservative. Overall, the results reveal significant differences in the association between NAVs and DCFs for Buyout versus VC funds, which is particularly important for private equity fund investors in their consideration of the relevance and reliability of NAV estimates provided by fund managers.