Private equity for the masses: General partners going public and Its impact on the private equity fund returns
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School of Business |
Master's thesis
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Date
2024
Department
Major/Subject
Mcode
Degree programme
Finance
Language
en
Pages
64+3
Series
Abstract
This thesis examines the impact of private equity (PE) fund managers’ initial public offerings (IPOs) on fund-level performance. It focuses on whether the best-performing PE fund managers capitalize on their previous performance to go public and whether the performance declines post-IPO. The thesis uses a dataset of 12,073 funds sourced from Preqin. It employs Coarsened Exact Matching (CEM), several OLS regression models, and Difference-in-Differences (DiD) analysis, with additional robustness checks to ensure validity. The findings reveal that pre-IPO, the funds managed by soon-to-be public PE fund managers (LPEs) are substantially larger and are essentially on par with the traditional private equity funds (TPEs) in performance. Post-IPO, this size difference increases, and performance weakens by -2.1%pp on Internal Rate of Return (IRR) and -0.26 on Total-Value-Paid-In-Capital (TVPI) compared to the peers. Besides the “IPO effect”, the most significant contributors to the underperformance are the increased fund size and the fact that the LPEs are deviating more from their PE fund manager’s stated primary strategy. This thesis contributes to the understanding of IPO impact within the PE sector, an area that has been mainly unexplored. The results help to fill this recognized knowledge gap and provide insights for PE managers and investors, emphasizing the importance of strategic alignment and operational adaptability when reaching out to the public markets.Description
Thesis advisor
Knüpfer, SamuliKeywords
private equity, initial public offering, fund performance, listed private equity