Private equity performance: can you learn the recipe for success?

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Volume Title

School of Business | Bachelor's thesis

Date

2017

Major/Subject

Mcode

Degree programme

Rahoitus

Language

en

Pages

24

Series

Abstract

In this thesis, I study the relationship between private equity fund managers’ experience and fund returns. Previous private equity research has focused mainly on the performance persistence of fund returns and the contribution of this paper is to study the learning effect of private equity funds’ general partners. The data used in this thesis is collected from the SDC Platinum VentureXpert and the EurekaHedge Private Equity database. I restrict the study to US buyout and venture capital funds with vintages from 1980 to 2001. The VentureXpert data has an extensive coverage of funds in 1980’s and 1990’s whereas the EurekaHedge contains data on more recent funds. To investigate experience, I use the fund sequence as a proxy for the general partner’s experience. To investigate the performance, I study the effect of experience on the successful divestment rate of the portfolio companies as well as different performance measure multiples that are commonly used in private equity research. The central findings of the study imply that the managers’ experience correlates highly with fund returns particularly as for venture capital. The same relationship is observable for buyout funds, as well, but not to the same extent. I also find a negative correlation between the fund size and the performance as for VC funds.

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Thesis advisor

Önal, Bunyamin

Keywords

private equity, performance, manager experience, fund sequence

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