سهام خصوصی، خرید استقراضی و اداره

This paper provides an overview of the literature on private equity and leveraged buyouts, focusing on global evidence related to both governance and returns to private equity and leveraged buyouts. We distinguish between financial and real returns to this activity, where the latter refers to productivity and broader performance measures. We also outline a research agenda on this topic.

The recent resurgence of leveraged buyouts (henceforth, LBOs) and the concomitant rise of “private equity” markets in the U.S. and internationally, has been accompanied by renewed concerns about their effects (e.g. Financial Services Authority, 2006). These concerns emphasize a need to evaluate the impact of these transactions on organizations and society. Researchers typically assess the impact of such changes in ownership on firm performance by examining effects on short-run stock prices (“event studies”), long-run stock prices, returns to investors, or accounting profits of publicly-traded firms.3 This approach provides evidence on the firm-level, financial “returns” to buyouts.

There is ample scope for additional research on private equity and buyouts. First, it would be useful to examine the productivity impact of different types of buyouts. For instance, there is some debate about the pre-buyout agency cost problems in private firms. On the one hand, private firms could have lower agency costs than publicly-traded firms, since they are usually owned and managed by a small, concentrated group of shareholders (e.g., a founder and his family). On the other hand, there is recognition that some family firms have diverse ownership and control structures that can introduce agency problems (Schulze et al., 2001; Morck and Yeung, 2003; Howorth et al., 2004; Scholes et al., in press). Thus, further research could examine whether there are differences in the productivity effects of public to private and private to private buyouts. As well, there is the phenomenon of the “reverse” buyout (Degeorge and Zeckhauser, 1993), which occurs when an MBO goes public again. While we have evidence that private to public buyouts yield improvements in financial and accounting performance, these improvements appear to decline over time (Holthausen and Larcker, 1996). Studies also reveal that IPOs of MBOs backed by more reputable private equity firms perform better than those backed by less prestigious private equity firms (Jelic et al., 2005). It might also be useful to analyze productivity before and after reverse MBOs.