Private Equity and Industry Performance

Shai  Bernstein; Josh   Lerner; Morten  Sorensen; Per  Stromberg

Article | Management Science | April 2017

Private Equity and Industry Performance

by Shai Bernstein, Josh Lerner, Morten Sorensen and Per Stromberg

Abstract

The growth of the private equity industry has spurred concerns about its potential impact on the economy more generally. This analysis looks across nations and industries to assess the impact of private equity on industry performance. Industries where PE funds have invested in the past five years have grown more quickly in terms of productivity and employment. There are few significant differences between industries with limited and high private equity activity. It is hard to find support for claims that economic activity in industries with private equity backing is more exposed to aggregate shocks. The results using lagged private equity investments suggest that the results are not driven by reverse causality. These patterns are not driven solely by common law nations such as the United Kingdom and United States, but also hold in Continental Europe.

Keywords: Private Equity; Markets; Entrepreneurship; Performance; Economy;

Format: Print

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Citation:

Bernstein, Shai, Josh Lerner, Morten Sorensen, and Per Stromberg. "Private Equity and Industry Performance." Management Science 63, no. 4 (April 2017): 1198–1213.

Impact investing has grown significantly over the past 15 years. From a niche investing segment with only $25 billion AUM in 2013 (WEF 2013), it experienced double-digit growth and developed into a market with an estimated $502 billion AUM (Mudaliapar and Dithrich 2019). Despite the growth and maturation of impact investing, gathering complete and accurate data on the characteristics of this industry continues to be a challenge. This paper describes the creation of a new dataset on both impact investors and the portfolio companies they fund, comprising 409 impact investors and 13,212 portfolio companies. We code impact investors according to established categories such as legal form, types of investments and return objectives. We then develop measures of the relative importance of social impact for each investor in an effort to add a new analytic categorization. We conclude by describing the distribution of investors and firms across these various categories.

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Private Equity and Industry Performance

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