ABSTRACT Investment consultants advise institutional investors on their choice of fund manager. Focusing on U.S. actively managed equity funds, we analyze the factors that drive consultants’ recommendations, what impact these recommendations have on flows, and how well the recommended funds perform. We find that investment consultants’ recommendations of funds are driven largely by soft factors, rather than the funds’ past performance, and that their recommendations have a significant effect on fund flows. However, we find no evidence that these recommendations add value, suggesting that the search for winners, encouraged and guided by investment consultants, is fruitless.

In this paper, we investigate the role of educational ties in private equity. Although we cannot observe all the funds that bid for a target company, we construct the set of potential bidders based upon their size and investment cycle, as well as the location and sector of their target companies. By gathering detailed educational histories of fund partners and CEOs of target firms, we find a significantly higher incidence of educational ties in completed deals than exists among the set of potential bidders. We argue that educational ties between fund managers and CEOs of target companies play a (positive) role in sourcing deals and winning competitive transactions. The alma maters of CEOs and private equity partners are notably concentrated among the top universities, and we find that exclusivity of educational ties is important. However, we find no evidence that such educational ties produce higher returns for investors.

Private equity performance, both for buyouts and venture capital, has been highly cyclical: periods of high fundraising have been followed by periods of low performance. Despite this seemingly predictable variation, we find modest gains, at best, to pursuing realistic, investable strategies that time capital commitments to private equity. This occurs, in part, because investors can only time their commitments to funds; they cannot time when commitments are called or when investments are exited. There is a high degree of time-series correlation in net cash flows even across commitment strategies that allocate capital in a very different manner over time.

ABSTRACT Private equity funds pay particular attention to capital structure when executing leveraged buyouts, creating an interesting setting for examining capital structure theories. Using a large, international sample of buyouts from 1980 to 2008, we find that buyout leverage is unrelated to the cross‐sectional factors, suggested by traditional capital structure theories, that drive public firm leverage. Instead, variation in economy‐wide credit conditions is the main determinant of leverage in buyouts. Higher deal leverage is associated with higher transaction prices and lower buyout fund returns, suggesting that acquirers overpay when access to credit is easier.

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.