The equity gap, the difference between the amount of (risk) capital that would be invested under conditions of well-informed and competitive markets and the amount of capital actually invested, covers both startups and ventures moving beyond startup to the establishment and early growth phase. We provide estimates for the size of the equity gap for firms facing later stage financing issues, the second equity gap. This ‘second’ equity gap relates to a second so-called ‘valley of death’ in financing the growth phase, and is particularly pertinent for knowledge-intensive (KI) firms. We utilize a unique panel database covering the population of limited companies, which includes 2852 VC backed companies and 4048 deals. Using propensity scoring methods and multivariate models determining investment demand we screen the corporate population for potential VC investments and estimate the size of the equity gap in total and the KI firms that face, potentially, the second equity gap as a subset of our total estimates.

We assess the recent economic and financial performance of U.K. private equity (PE) backed buyouts. Our empirical evidence, which is based on thousands of transactions, reveals that PE-backed buyouts achieved superior economic and financial performance in the period before and during the recent global recession, relative to comparable firms that did not experience such transactions. Our regression results imply positive differentials of 5–15% in productivity and approximately 3–5% in profitability for buyout firms, relative to non-buyout firms. Another key finding is that revenue and employment growth for PE- backed firms were positive during the sample period.

We assess the total factor productivity of 35,752 manufacturing establishments before and after management buyouts (MBOs). MBO plants are less productive than comparable plants before the transfer of ownership. They experience a substantial increase in productivity after a buyout, which appears to be due to measures undertaken by new owners to reduce the labor intensity of production, via outsourcing of intermediate goods and materials. These findings, which are pervasive across industries, imply that MBOs reduce agency costs and enhance economic efficiency. Our evidence is consistent with Jovanovic and Rousseau (2002), who suggest that ownership changes shift resources to more efficient uses and to better managers.