Prior research on the performance of private equity investing (including both buyout and venture capital funds) has led to mixed conclusions. This is perhaps not surprising given concerns about the lack of high quality data for research. For instance, some private equity (PE) data sets rely on voluntary reporting by funds or on Freedom of Information Act requests which may result in biased samples and incomplete data. We use a new research-quality data set of PE fund-level cash flows from Burgiss. The data are derived entirely from institutional investors (the limited partners) for whom Burgiss’ systems provide record-keeping and performance monitoring services. This feature results in detailed, verified, and cross-checked investment histories for nearly 1,400 PE funds derived from the holdings of over 200 institutional investors. Our research highlights the importance of high quality data for understanding PE and the returns it provides to investors. Here we focus on results using the public market equivalent (PME) method of Kaplan-Schoar (JF 2005). PME is a market-adjusted multiple which compares how much a 2 PE fund investor actually earned net of fees to what the investor would have earned in an equivalent investment in the public market. A PME above 1.0 signals higher returns to private compared to public equity. After summarizing conclusions, we present key empirical results.