Techn. University, Diss.--München, 2007.

Zugl.: München, Univ., Diss., 2006

This dissertation is an ethnographic description of the process by which private equity investors buy, manage, and sell companies for profit, all while private equity, as an industry, manages around $3.5 trillion of capital. Drawing from data gathered from the summer of 2012 through fall of 2014, this dissertation offers an account of investing that diverges from other ethnographic cases in that it relies on ongoing conversations about value and time that investors have, which seek to justify the decisions investors make. Once I explain how investors find and create value as well as the opportune time to invest, I explain how this negotiation fits into a stereotyped, formalized deal process, which acts like a total social fact in rearranging people and wealth in social life. I ultimately suggest that this approach to explaining the action of private equity investors has a broader use in rendering other financial capitalists ethnographically comparable to private equity investors, as well as in rendering other societal distributions of wealth and poverty comparable to that which exists in the contemporary United States.

This paper investigates the performance of private equity partnerships using a data set of individual fund returns collected by Venture Economics. Over the sample period, average fund returns net of fees approximately equal the S&P 500 although there is a large degree of heterogeneity among fund returns. Returns persist strongly across funds raised by individual private equity partnerships. The returns also improve with partnership experience. Better performing funds are more likely to raise follow-on funds and raise larger funds than funds that perform poorly. This relationship is concave so that top performing funds do not grow proportionally as much as the average fund in the market. At the industry level, we show that market entry in the private equity industry is cyclical. Funds (and partnerships) started in boom times are less likely to raise follow-on funds, suggesting that these funds subsequently perform worse. Aggregate industry returns are lower following a boom, but most of this effect is driven by the poor performance of new entrants, while the returns of established funds are much less affected by these industry cycles. Several of these results differ markedly from those for mutual funds.

Zugl.: München, Univ., Diss., 2009

Zugl.: Diplomarbeit

Universiẗat, Diss--Basel, 2007.

Zugl.: Köln, Universiẗat, Diss., 2007.

Zugl.: Wien, Techn. Univ., Diss., 2001

Zugl.: München, Tech. Univ., Diss., 2007