Documents private equity 51 results

"Almost exactly 30 years ago, a famous article by Michael Jensen in the Harvard Business Review predicted that private equity would ‘eclipse' the public corporation because it was a superior form of corporate ownership. Trends since 1989 seem to bear out Jensen's prediction. Much time and energy has gone into studying whether the private equity model does see companies being run better for investors and society. Progress has been made and most studies find positive results. But samples are usually relatively small. And the relative complexity of private equity transactions, combined with a high level of privacy, makes it hard to find financial statements that are tractable enough for meaningful analysis. After 30 years of research, we argue that a conclusive answer to the question remains further away than might seem to be the case. In the meantime, the appropriate regulatory response involves narrowing the ‘regulatory gap' between public and private markets."

"We provide the first cross-country evidence of the effect of investment by private equity firms on innovation, focusing on a sample of European countries and using Kortum and Lerner's (2000) empirical methodology. Using an 18-country panel covering the period 1991-2004, we study how private equity finance affects patent applications and patent grants. We address concerns about causality in several ways, including exploiting variation in laws regulating the investment behaviour of pension funds and insurance companies across countries and over time. We also control for the standard determinants of innovation like R&D, human capital, and patent protection. Our estimates imply that while private equity investment accounts for 8% of aggregate (private equity plus R&D) industrial spending, PE accounts for as much as 12% of industrial innovation. We also present similar evidence from the biotech industry to alleviate concerns that our results are biased by aggregation."

"The book provides a comprehensive, comparative treatment of the development of New Investment Funds (NIFs)—private equity, hedge funds, and sovereign wealth funds—and their impact upon labour and employment. Several countries are selected for in-depth treatment with a chapter devoted to each: US, UK, Australia, Germany, Netherlands, Sweden, Italy, Poland, and Japan. The book examines variations in the level and type of fund activity between countries, considers influences upon these variations, and analyses differences in the impact of these funds on labour and employment. This analysis is located in a broader discussion of the nature and development of corporate financialization and comparative capitalism. Financialization has supported the development and growth of these funds, and many aspects of these funds exemplify the process of financialization.
Each chapter reports the evidence on the impact of these funds on labour and employment. Case studies conducted by the authors supplement other evidence. Much of the evidence shows that private equity funds can have adverse effects on labour, such as reductions in employment, but there is also evidence of more positive effects in some cases such as employment growth and adoption of high commitment human resource practices. There is much less evidence on the effects of activist HFs and SWFs, with the impact on labour typically being indirect.
Between them, the chapters show that variations in national regulation have a significant impact on both the development of fund activities and their effects. With regard to labour effects, employment and labour regulations do not seem to be of prime importance in explaining the level of fund activity, but regulation supporting worker consultation and voice affects the capacity of labour representatives to influence the outcomes of fund activity on labour and employment."

"This article explores the impact of private equity (PE) firms on human resource management practices in buy-outs using data drawn from the first representative pan-European survey into this issue. The findings suggest the overall impact of PE on high-performance work practices (HPWP) is affected more by length of the investment relationship than the countries where PE is going to or is coming from. PE investment results in the increased use of HPWP in buy-outs the longer the anticipated time to exit. With respect to the PE firms' country of origin, buy-outs backed by Anglo-Saxon PE firms are as likely to introduce new HPWP (and are specifically more likely to extend performance-related pay schemes) as those backed by non-Anglo-Saxon PE firms, suggesting some adaptation to the local host country contexts of buy-outs."

"Across the OECD, a process of financialisation of the economy can be observed. Defined as the increasing dominance of the finance industry over the real economy and workers, financialisation can take different forms, including: growing instability and opacity of financial markets, increasing focus on shareholder value and the rise of alternative investors. This article reviews in particular the challenges to trade unions posed by the rise of the shareholder value model of governance in listed companies – as seen during the review of the OECD Corporate Governance Principles in 2004 – and more recently the boom in private equity buyout transactions. The trade union response to financialisation has followed two tracks: to engage in regulatory advocacy at national and international levels for stakeholder approaches to corporate governance and financial markets and to mobilise workers' capital managed by pension funds to ensure responsible and longterm investor behaviour."