Private Equity
Private Equity Research Consortium (PERC) is an assemblage of academic researchers and industry professionals dedicated to advancing research on private equity and credit. Our core mission is to develop a better understanding of how private capital investments affect both financial results and broader economic outcomes.
PERC, organized through IPC, was established in 2012 by scholars from the business schools at The University of Chicago, Duke University, UNC-Chapel Hill, University of Oxford, and The University of Virginia as well as other institutions who recognized challenges facing empirical research on private equity. PERC supports academic studies by researchers all over the world by facilitating access to data for scholars. For example, PERC has an exclusive arrangement with Burgiss to provide access to data for academic research. The Burgiss dataset includes 7,000 funds with over $5.5 trillion in assets. It is sourced directly from limited partners and contains full performance histories of cash flows at the fund level. The Burgiss dataset represents the largest and most in-depth dataset of its kind on venture, buyout, and real estate funds available for academic research.
PERC periodically accepts applications from academic researchers for access to Burgiss private equity fund data.
Latest Private Equity Research
Venture Capital Contracts
Working Paper
We develop a dynamic search and matching model to estimate the impact of venture capital (VC) contract terms on start-up outcomes, and the split of value between entrepreneur and investor, in the presence of endogenous selection. Using a new, large data set of rst nancing rounds of start-up companies, we find an internally optimal equity split between VC and entrepreneur that maximizes the probability of success, consistent with standard double moral hazard theories. However, in virtually all deals, VCs use their bargaining power to receive more equity than is value-maximizing for the start-up. In most cases, participation rights and investor board representation reduce company value, while shifting more value to the investors. More
Can Investors Time Their Exposure to Private Equity?
Working Paper
We find modest gains, at best, to pursuing more realistic, investable strategies that time capital commitments to private equity. 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. More
When Investor Incentives and Consumer Interests Diverge – Private Equity in Higher Education
This paper uses private equity buyouts to study a transition from lower- to higher-powered profit-maximizing incentives in higher education. Relative to closely-held private firms or diffusely-held publicly traded firms, private equity-owned firms have particularly high-powered incentives to maximize profits (Jensen 1989). More