Academics
A curated library of real, verified academic research and business-school case studies on mergers and acquisitions — 167 papers and 168 case studies, each with a brief and a link to the original source. Growing over time.
335 results
- Case study2026
A Detailed Analysis of ETA CEO Demographics and Financial Outcomes
Yale SOM case study: A Detailed Analysis of ETA CEO Demographics and Financial Outcomes. Part of the school's entrepreneurship-through-acquisition and search fund case series.
Read the case study → - Case study2026
A Mathematical Analysis of Value-Creation Attribution in Search Fund Projects
Yale SOM case study: A Mathematical Analysis of Value-Creation Attribution in Search Fund Projects. Part of the school's entrepreneurship-through-acquisition and search fund case series.
Read the case study → - Case study2026
An Analysis of Industry Economic Performance in Search Funds
Yale SOM case study: An Analysis of Industry Economic Performance in Search Funds. Part of the school's entrepreneurship-through-acquisition and search fund case series.
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Customer Service is the Underappreciated Compounding Asset of ETA
Yale SOM case study: Customer Service is the Underappreciated Compounding Asset of ETA. Part of the school's entrepreneurship-through-acquisition and search fund case series.
Read the case study → - Research paper2026
Democratizing Private Markets: Equilibrium Predictions
Uses a calibrated production-based asset-pricing model to study how opening private markets to retail investors affects investors and firms. Democratization raises retail investors' welfare only marginally, even with no extra costs relative to institutions, because the private market is too small for improved risk sharing to matter much. It does, however, substantially reshape private firms' ownership, materially lower their cost of capital and lead them to grow, while the positive CAPM alpha earned by private equity shrinks.
Read the paper → - Case study2026
Engineering EBITDA Multiple Expansion and the Paramount Role of Investment Bankers in ETA Exits
Yale SOM case study: Engineering EBITDA Multiple Expansion and the Paramount Role of Investment Bankers in ETA Exits. Part of the school's entrepreneurship-through-acquisition and search fund case series.
Read the case study → - Case study2026
Exploring Bilateral Conflicts of Interest Between Entrepreneurs and Investors in Search Fund Projects
Yale SOM teaching note exploring Bilateral Conflicts of Interest Between Entrepreneurs and Investors in Search Fund Projects, part of the school's entrepreneurship-through-acquisition case series.
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How Are ETA CEOs Really Faring?
Yale SOM case study: How Are ETA CEOs Really Faring. Part of the school's entrepreneurship-through-acquisition and search fund case series.
Read the case study → - Research paper2026
Long Goodbyes: How Do Private Equity Funds Manage Sell-Downs After Initial Public Offerings?
Analyzes how private equity funds sell down their stakes in companies they take public, on which GPs continue to earn management fees and carried interest. Average duration of post-IPO holdings is three years although lockups expire after six months. PE-backed IPOs perform well during the lockup but GPs add no value through the timing of aftermarket sell-downs; they appear reluctant to sell losers, and long holds are more likely when the fund is performing better, resulting in higher payments to GPs.
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Private Equity and Gas Emissions: Evidence from Electric Power Plants
Examines the effect of private equity buyouts on the environmental performance of U.S. fossil fuel power plants. Output-scaled CO2 emissions are on average 4.2% lower after buyouts, predominantly because of fuel-saving improvements in production efficiency. Emission intensities decline more after buyouts by pro-ESG PE firms through both efficiency gains and enhanced emission control, suggesting PE firms implement environmentally beneficial changes that also raise profits but lack incentives for privately costly ones absent ESG preferences.
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Private Equity and Pay Gaps Inside the Firm
Uses two decades of French administrative data to study how leveraged buyouts affect pay gaps inside target firms. Post-LBO, targets reduce within-firm pay gaps while increasing profitability relative to controls, with the reduction driven by employee turnover, since separated employees are paid more and new joiners less than comparable staff, especially among skilled workers. Post-buyout p90/p10, gender, age and manager/non-manager pay gaps decline by 3%, 9%, 21% and 4% respectively, and the employee pool becomes younger.
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Private Equity Buyouts and Employee Health
Examines the role of employee health in labor force restructuring during private equity buyouts using employee-level data on 56,000 Dutch buyout employees. The authors find no evidence that buyouts harm employee health, but employees lose income and employment after buyouts and these losses are far larger for employees in poorer health. Social transfers buffer income losses, more so for less healthy employees who exit the labor market at much higher rates, and health characteristics associated with lower wages strongly predict post-buyout job loss.
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The Fragility of Semi-Liquid Private Credit Funds
Studies fragility in semi-liquid private credit funds, which manage over $300 billion and hold far more illiquid loans than loan mutual funds while offering quarterly redemptions at NAV typically capped at 5% of shares. Cash buffers and contractual loan repayments are insufficient to fund repeated 5% quarterly redemptions, inflows fall when outflows rise, and net outflows are met by selling illiquid loans, borrowing and delaying repurchase payments, creating strategic complementarity among investors. The authors conclude that quarterly gates and caps do not eliminate run-like fragility, cautioning against expanding retail access to private credit.
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The Growth of Private Lending and Retail Access to Alternative Investments
Examines publicly traded Business Development Companies (BDCs) as a window on retail access to private lending, which has grown with the retreat of banks and the expansion of private equity. BDC compensation structures include fees and provisions common in PE, and BDCs collectively provide debt for PE-sponsored deals and make PE-like investments, especially higher-spread ones. In-sample risk-adjusted abnormal returns are high, but fees and performance are inversely related and BDCs with larger non-institutional investor bases charge higher fees.
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The Pernicious Effects of Falling Acquisition Rates in the ETA Ecosystem
Yale SOM case study: The Pernicious Effects of Falling Acquisition Rates in the ETA Ecosystem. Part of the school's entrepreneurship-through-acquisition and search fund case series.
Read the case study → - Case study2025
A Call to Philanthropy in the Search Fund Ecosystem
Yale SOM case study: A Call to Philanthropy in the Search Fund Ecosystem. Part of the school's entrepreneurship-through-acquisition and search fund case series.
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Acquirer Board Independence and Acquisitions Performance: A Meta-Analysis
Synthesizes 85 empirical studies and finds a positive relationship between acquirer board independence and acquisition performance, moderated by shareholder-rights regimes.
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A Dozen Questions to Consider After Selling Your Business
Yale SOM case study: A Dozen Questions to Consider After Selling Your Business. Part of the school's entrepreneurship-through-acquisition and search fund case series.
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A Framework to Contemplate Post-MBA Career Paths
Yale SOM case study: A Framework to Contemplate Post-MBA Career Paths. Part of the school's entrepreneurship-through-acquisition and search fund case series.
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Ahron Oddman and Old North Bank
Yale SOM case study: Ahron Oddman and Old North Bank. Part of the school's entrepreneurship-through-acquisition and search fund case series.
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A New CEO's Checklist for Quickly Understanding and Leading a Business
Yale SOM case study: A New CEO's Checklist for Quickly Understanding and Leading a Business. Part of the school's entrepreneurship-through-acquisition and search fund case series.
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A Primer on Breakeven Analysis
Yale SOM case study: A Primer on Breakeven Analysis. Part of the school's entrepreneurship-through-acquisition and search fund case series.
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A Proposal on Equity Pooling for Search Fund Entrepreneurs
Yale SOM case study: A Proposal on Equity Pooling for Search Fund Entrepreneurs. Part of the school's entrepreneurship-through-acquisition and search fund case series.
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A Reference Guide on European Search Funds
Yale SOM case study: A Reference Guide on European Search Funds. Part of the school's entrepreneurship-through-acquisition and search fund case series.
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Ari Santiago and CompassMSP
Yale SOM case study: Ari Santiago and CompassMSP. Part of the school's entrepreneurship-through-acquisition and search fund case series.
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Attempting to Enter a Franchise System as a Self-funded Searcher Can Be a Roller-coaster Ride
Yale SOM case study: Attempting to Enter a Franchise System as a Self-funded Searcher Can Be a Roller-coaster Ride. Part of the school's entrepreneurship-through-acquisition and search fund case series.
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A Value-Creation Journey
Yale SOM case study: A Value-Creation Journey. Part of the school's entrepreneurship-through-acquisition and search fund case series.
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Bovard and Majid
Yale SOM case study: Bovard and Majid. Part of the school's entrepreneurship-through-acquisition and search fund case series.
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Capital Structure & Firm Outcomes: Evidence from Dividend Recapitalizations in Private Equity
Isolates the causal effect of a large leverage increase using private equity-sponsored dividend recapitalizations, where companies borrow to pay investor distributions. After accounting for positive selection, an average 84% increase in total debt raises the chance of financial distress by 2.4 times the targeted-firm mean, in line with Altman-Z calibrations. Dividend recaps increase deal returns but reduce fund returns, and also reduce employee wages and loan prices for pre-existing creditors.
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Cash Management Principles in a Small Business
Yale SOM case study: Cash Management Principles in a Small Business. Part of the school's entrepreneurship-through-acquisition and search fund case series.
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Check Your Strategy and Capital Allocation Aspirations
Yale SOM case study: Check Your Strategy and Capital Allocation Aspirations. Part of the school's entrepreneurship-through-acquisition and search fund case series.
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Do Employees Cheer for Private Equity? The Heterogeneous Effects of Buyouts on Job Quality
Shows that private equity leveraged buyouts reduce perceived job quality despite not affecting average base pay, which appears to reflect employees bearing more risk. Both job quality and incentive pay are more tied to firm performance at PE-owned companies than at public controls, with a 1% higher deal return associated with 0.7% more employee incentive pay. Declines in job satisfaction after a buyout are concentrated in high-leverage deals and among employees with worse outside options.
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Does Private Equity Ownership Make Firms Cleaner? The Role of Environmental Liability Risks
Shows that private equity ownership in private-to-private buyouts reduces pollution when the target faces high potential liabilities for polluting, but PE-backed firms increase pollution when environmental liability risks are low. Identification uses a natural experiment that reduced liability risks for projects on federal land and specific PE deals in the energy industry, pointing to PE governance as the main driver. The results suggest litigation and regulatory risk can mitigate potentially detrimental effects of PE ownership on stakeholders.
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Does Recurring Revenue Really Drive Financial Outcomes in Search Fund-Acquired Businesses?
Yale SOM case study: Does Recurring Revenue Really Drive Financial Outcomes in Search Fund-Acquired Businesses. Part of the school's entrepreneurship-through-acquisition and search fund case series.
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Doug Cook: Exploring a 10x10+ Entrepreneur
Yale SOM case study: Doug Cook: Exploring a 10x10+ Entrepreneur. Part of the school's entrepreneurship-through-acquisition and search fund case series.
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Do You Have What It Takes to Be an Entrepreneur?
Yale SOM case study: Do You Have What It Takes to Be an Entrepreneur. Part of the school's entrepreneurship-through-acquisition and search fund case series.
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Eight Questions Aspiring Search Fund Entrepreneurs Should Consider Before Launching Their Project
Yale SOM case study: Eight Questions Aspiring Search Fund Entrepreneurs Should Consider Before Launching Their Project. Part of the school's entrepreneurship-through-acquisition and search fund case series.
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European Wax Center in Manhattan
Yale SOM case study: European Wax Center in Manhattan. Part of the school's entrepreneurship-through-acquisition and search fund case series.
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Examining the Franchise Disclosure Document
Yale SOM teaching note examining the Franchise Disclosure Document, part of the school's entrepreneurship-through-acquisition case series.
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Expanding EBITDA Margins in an ETA Business? Don't Expect It, but Don't Lose Hope, Either
Yale SOM case study: Expanding EBITDA Margins in an ETA Business? Don't Expect It, but Don't Lose Hope, Either. Part of the school's entrepreneurship-through-acquisition and search fund case series.
Read the case study → - Case study2025
Exploring and Understanding the U.S. Small Business Administration 7(a) Loan Program
Yale SOM teaching note exploring and Understanding the U.S. Small Business Administration 7(a) Loan Program, part of the school's entrepreneurship-through-acquisition case series.
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Exploring and Understanding the Various Legal Documents in a Search Fund Project
Yale SOM teaching note exploring and Understanding the Various Legal Documents in a Search Fund Project, part of the school's entrepreneurship-through-acquisition case series.
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Exploring an Integration Framework in a Programmatic Acquisition Strategy
Yale SOM teaching note exploring an Integration Framework in a Programmatic Acquisition Strategy, part of the school's entrepreneurship-through-acquisition case series.
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Exploring Business Operating Systems in Search Fund-Acquired Companies
Yale SOM teaching note exploring Business Operating Systems in Search Fund-Acquired Companies, part of the school's entrepreneurship-through-acquisition case series.
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Exploring Earnouts and Their Use in Search Fund Acquisitions
Yale SOM teaching note exploring Earnouts and Their Use in Search Fund Acquisitions, part of the school's entrepreneurship-through-acquisition case series.
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Exploring Employee Terminations in Search Fund-Acquired Companies and Small Businesses
Yale SOM teaching note exploring Employee Terminations in Search Fund-Acquired Companies and Small Businesses, part of the school's entrepreneurship-through-acquisition case series.
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Exploring Entrepreneur Partnerships in the Search Fund Ecosystem
Yale SOM teaching note exploring Entrepreneur Partnerships in the Search Fund Ecosystem, part of the school's entrepreneurship-through-acquisition case series.
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Exploring Franchisees as a Post-MBA Entrepreneurial Path
Yale SOM teaching note exploring Franchisees as a Post-MBA Entrepreneurial Path, part of the school's entrepreneurship-through-acquisition case series.
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Exploring Holding Companies in the Search Fund Ecosystem
Yale SOM teaching note exploring Holding Companies in the Search Fund Ecosystem, part of the school's entrepreneurship-through-acquisition case series.
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Exploring How ETA CEOs and Private Equity Buyers Can Better Collaborate After an Acquisition
Yale SOM teaching note exploring How ETA CEOs and Private Equity Buyers Can Better Collaborate After an Acquisition, part of the school's entrepreneurship-through-acquisition case series.
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Exploring How to Build a Training and Development Program in a Search Fund-Acquired Business
Yale SOM teaching note exploring How to Build a Training and Development Program in a Search Fund-Acquired Business, part of the school's entrepreneurship-through-acquisition case series.
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Exploring How to Partner with a Law Firm for a Search Fund Project
Yale SOM teaching note exploring How to Partner with a Law Firm for a Search Fund Project, part of the school's entrepreneurship-through-acquisition case series.
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Exploring Open-Book Management in a Search Fund-Acquired Small Business
Yale SOM teaching note exploring Open-Book Management in a Search Fund-Acquired Small Business, part of the school's entrepreneurship-through-acquisition case series.
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Exploring Post-exit Dynamics for Search Fund Entrepreneurs
Yale SOM teaching note exploring Post-exit Dynamics for Search Fund Entrepreneurs, part of the school's entrepreneurship-through-acquisition case series.
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Exploring Risk Mitigation Concepts in a Search Fund Company
Yale SOM teaching note exploring Risk Mitigation Concepts in a Search Fund Company, part of the school's entrepreneurship-through-acquisition case series.
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Exploring Search Fund Entrepreneur Economics
Yale SOM teaching note exploring Search Fund Entrepreneur Economics, part of the school's entrepreneurship-through-acquisition case series.
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Exploring Six Key Decisions Post-Exit Entrepreneurs Will Have to Make
Yale SOM teaching note exploring Six Key Decisions Post-Exit Entrepreneurs Will Have to Make, part of the school's entrepreneurship-through-acquisition case series.
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Exploring the CEO's Leadership Role in a Search Fund-Acquired Small Business
Yale SOM teaching note exploring the CEO's Leadership Role in a Search Fund-Acquired Small Business, part of the school's entrepreneurship-through-acquisition case series.
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Exploring the Future of Entrepreneurship through Acquisition
Yale SOM teaching note exploring the Future of Entrepreneurship through Acquisition, part of the school's entrepreneurship-through-acquisition case series.
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Exploring the Role Accounting Firms Play in a Search Fund Project
Yale SOM teaching note exploring the Role Accounting Firms Play in a Search Fund Project, part of the school's entrepreneurship-through-acquisition case series.
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Exploring the Shared Services Function When Scaling a Multi-unit Franchise Operation
Yale SOM teaching note exploring the Shared Services Function When Scaling a Multi-unit Franchise Operation, part of the school's entrepreneurship-through-acquisition case series.
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Exploring Various Search Fund Structures
Yale SOM teaching note exploring Various Search Fund Structures, part of the school's entrepreneurship-through-acquisition case series.
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FARM: An Impact Investing Collaborative
Yale SOM case study: FARM: An Impact Investing Collaborative. Part of the school's entrepreneurship-through-acquisition and search fund case series.
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Financializing the Professions: The Rise of Private Equity in Accounting
Examines how private equity ownership changes the organization and market structure of accounting firms, linking more than 3,600 PE transactions from 1999-2024 to data on M&A, labor markets and audit pricing. PE investment accelerates sharply after 2020 and reaches both CPA-licensed audit firms and non-CPA advisory practices, concentrated in large mid-tier PCAOB-registered firms. After PE entry firms grow faster, with rising non-audit revenue, expanding employment and more cross-state M&A consistent with platform building, while labor-market concentration and ERISA audit fees rise.
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Garth Parker Considers a Post-MBA Search Fund and Other Career Choices
Yale SOM case study: Garth Parker Considers a Post-MBA Search Fund and Other Career Choices. Part of the school's entrepreneurship-through-acquisition and search fund case series.
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German Canale: Ice, Ice, Baby
Yale SOM case study: German Canale: Ice, Ice, Baby. Part of the school's entrepreneurship-through-acquisition and search fund case series.
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How are Search Fund Investors Really Faring?
Yale SOM case study: How are Search Fund Investors Really Faring. Part of the school's entrepreneurship-through-acquisition and search fund case series.
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Including Employees in a Search Fund Waterfall
Yale SOM case study: Including Employees in a Search Fund Waterfall. Part of the school's entrepreneurship-through-acquisition and search fund case series.
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Interim Valuations, Predictability, and Outcomes in Private Equity
Uses a novel dataset of U.S. buyout and VC investments to test how informative fund managers' interim valuation reports are about final outcomes. Investors can do better than relying on the latest reported valuation: investments with greater past staleness or more frequent markdowns tend to perform worse subsequently, and exit timing is predictable. Combining interim realized and unrealized returns with staleness and markdown frequency helps predict whether an investment ends up in the left or right tail, as early as the first year.
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I Said, You Said: He's the Entrepreneur
Yale SOM case study: I Said, You Said: He's the Entrepreneur. Part of the school's entrepreneurship-through-acquisition and search fund case series.
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I Said, You Said: She's the Entrepreneur
Yale SOM case study: I Said, You Said: She's the Entrepreneur. Part of the school's entrepreneurship-through-acquisition and search fund case series.
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Jacob Lee and Scenthound
Yale SOM case study: Jacob Lee and Scenthound. Part of the school's entrepreneurship-through-acquisition and search fund case series.
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Kalil Diaz: A DR-based Search Firm Considers its First Acquisition
Yale SOM case study: Kalil Diaz: A DR-based Search Firm Considers its First Acquisition. Part of the school's entrepreneurship-through-acquisition and search fund case series.
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Kalil Diaz: Leadership Conundrums in a Search Fund-acquired Company
Yale SOM case study: Kalil Diaz: Leadership Conundrums in a Search Fund-acquired Company. Part of the school's entrepreneurship-through-acquisition and search fund case series.
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KBP Foods and Barry Dubin
Yale SOM case study: KBP Foods and Barry Dubin. Part of the school's entrepreneurship-through-acquisition and search fund case series.
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Khalil Tawil and Umi: A Startup Project That Checked All the Right Boxes
Yale SOM case study: Khalil Tawil and Umi: A Startup Project That Checked All the Right Boxes. Part of the school's entrepreneurship-through-acquisition and search fund case series.
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Khalil Tawil and Umi (B): The Epilogue
Yale SOM case study: Khalil Tawil and Umi (B): The Epilogue. Part of the school's entrepreneurship-through-acquisition and search fund case series.
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Krueger-Gilbert Health Physics
Yale SOM case study: Krueger-Gilbert Health Physics. Part of the school's entrepreneurship-through-acquisition and search fund case series.
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Mac Holland Considers His Third Chapter
Yale SOM case study: Mac Holland Considers His Third Chapter. Part of the school's entrepreneurship-through-acquisition and search fund case series.
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Mike Erwin: An Accidental Social Entrepreneur
Yale SOM case study: Mike Erwin: An Accidental Social Entrepreneur. Part of the school's entrepreneurship-through-acquisition and search fund case series.
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OnRamp Prepares for an Exit (A)
Yale SOM case study: OnRamp Prepares for an Exit (A). Part of the school's entrepreneurship-through-acquisition and search fund case series.
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OnRamp Prepares for an Exit (B)
Yale SOM case study: OnRamp Prepares for an Exit (B). Part of the school's entrepreneurship-through-acquisition and search fund case series.
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On the Nature of Building an Internship Program in a Search Fund Project
Yale SOM teaching note on the Nature of Building an Internship Program in a Search Fund Project, part of the school's entrepreneurship-through-acquisition case series.
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On the Nature of CEO Communication Patterns in a Small Business
Yale SOM teaching note on the Nature of CEO Communication Patterns in a Small Business, part of the school's entrepreneurship-through-acquisition case series.
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On the Nature of CEO Time Allocation in an SME
Yale SOM teaching note on the Nature of CEO Time Allocation in an SME, part of the school's entrepreneurship-through-acquisition case series.
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On the Nature of Customer Attrition and Revenue Analysis
Yale SOM teaching note on the Nature of Customer Attrition and Revenue Analysis, part of the school's entrepreneurship-through-acquisition case series.
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On the Nature of Debt
Yale SOM teaching note on the Nature of Debt, part of the school's entrepreneurship-through-acquisition case series.
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On the Nature of Due Diligence in a Search Fund Acquisition
Yale SOM teaching note on the Nature of Due Diligence in a Search Fund Acquisition, part of the school's entrepreneurship-through-acquisition case series.
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On the Nature of Economic Characteristics
Yale SOM teaching note on the Nature of Economic Characteristics, part of the school's entrepreneurship-through-acquisition case series.
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On the Nature of Entry Multiples
Yale SOM teaching note on the Nature of Entry Multiples, part of the school's entrepreneurship-through-acquisition case series.
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On the Nature of Long-term Holds: How Entrepreneurs Can Operationalize this Approach
Yale SOM teaching note on the Nature of Long-term Holds: How Entrepreneurs Can Operationalize this Approach, part of the school's entrepreneurship-through-acquisition case series.
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On the Nature of Long-term Holds: Why Entrepreneurs Should Embrace this Strategy
Yale SOM teaching note on the Nature of Long-term Holds: Why Entrepreneurs Should Embrace this Strategy, part of the school's entrepreneurship-through-acquisition case series.
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On the Nature of Modeling and Valuation in a Search Fund Acquisition
Yale SOM teaching note on the Nature of Modeling and Valuation in a Search Fund Acquisition, part of the school's entrepreneurship-through-acquisition case series.
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On the Nature of Passion in an Entrepreneurial Journey
Yale SOM teaching note on the Nature of Passion in an Entrepreneurial Journey, part of the school's entrepreneurship-through-acquisition case series.
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On the Nature of Programmatic Acquisition Strategies: How to Source Deals
Yale SOM teaching note on the Nature of Programmatic Acquisition Strategies: How to Source Deals, part of the school's entrepreneurship-through-acquisition case series.
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On the Nature of Programmatic Acquisition Strategies: Their Implementation
Yale SOM teaching note on the Nature of Programmatic Acquisition Strategies: Their Implementation, part of the school's entrepreneurship-through-acquisition case series.
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On the Nature of Programmatic Acquisition Strategies: Why Entrepreneurs Should Consider This Approach
Yale SOM teaching note on the Nature of Programmatic Acquisition Strategies: Why Entrepreneurs Should Consider This Approach, part of the school's entrepreneurship-through-acquisition case series.
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On the Nature of Programmatic Acquisition Strategies: Why Things Go Awry
Yale SOM teaching note on the Nature of Programmatic Acquisition Strategies: Why Things Go Awry, part of the school's entrepreneurship-through-acquisition case series.
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On the Nature of Revenue
Yale SOM teaching note on the Nature of Revenue, part of the school's entrepreneurship-through-acquisition case series.
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On the Nature of Seller Selection in a Search Fund Project
Yale SOM teaching note on the Nature of Seller Selection in a Search Fund Project, part of the school's entrepreneurship-through-acquisition case series.
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On the Nature of What Business Sellers Are Looking for in a Buyer
Yale SOM teaching note on the Nature of What Business Sellers Are Looking for in a Buyer, part of the school's entrepreneurship-through-acquisition case series.
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On the Nature of Women Considering a Search Fund Launch
Yale SOM teaching note on the Nature of Women Considering a Search Fund Launch, part of the school's entrepreneurship-through-acquisition case series.
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On the Nature of Working Capital: Understanding its Mysteries and Complexities
Yale SOM teaching note on the Nature of Working Capital: Understanding its Mysteries and Complexities, part of the school's entrepreneurship-through-acquisition case series.
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On the Nature of Work-Life Integration as a Search Fund CEO
Yale SOM teaching note on the Nature of Work-Life Integration as a Search Fund CEO, part of the school's entrepreneurship-through-acquisition case series.
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Patterns in Entrepreneurship
Yale SOM case study: Patterns in Entrepreneurship. Part of the school's entrepreneurship-through-acquisition and search fund case series.
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Physician Turnover Increased In Private Equity–Acquired Physician Practices
Uses clinician-level data linked to practice acquisitions from 2014-21 in a difference-in-differences design to study physician employment and turnover after PE acquisition of 200 ophthalmology practices with 1,980 clinicians. Relative to matched controls, PE-acquired practices increased total clinicians by 46.8% over three years, driven by more ophthalmologists and optometrists. PE acquisitions also raised physician turnover, with the annual share of physicians leaving rising by 13 percentage points (265%) relative to non-PE practices.
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Private Equity, Consumers, and Competition: Evidence from the Nursing Home Industry
Examines how product market competition shapes the effect of private equity acquisitions on consumers using nursing home buyouts. PE-owned facilities exhibit greater competitive sensitivity: they compete more aggressively when competitive incentives are strong and exploit market power more aggressively when they are weak, even comparing facilities bought in the same acquisition. PE-owned facilities also respond more to a pro-competitive policy helping consumers compare facilities, suggesting regulators should attend to market concentration where acquisitions occur. Later published in Management Science (2026).
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Private equity in the hospital industry
Examines survival, employment and patient outcomes at private equity-acquired U.S. hospitals. Target hospitals maintain survival rates while significantly reducing employment and wage expenditures; core medical staffing dips temporarily and recovers, but administrative job and wage cuts persist, particularly at formerly nonprofit hospitals. Using proprietary insurance claims data, the authors find no significant changes in patient demographics or inpatient prices, and while patient satisfaction declines there is no evidence of higher mortality or readmission rates.
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Profiles in Entrepreneurial Excellence - A Holistic Approach
Yale SOM case study: Profiles in Entrepreneurial Excellence - A Holistic Approach. Part of the school's entrepreneurship-through-acquisition and search fund case series.
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Quench USA
Yale SOM case study: Quench USA. Part of the school's entrepreneurship-through-acquisition and search fund case series.
Read the case study → - Case study2025
Questions Aspiring Search Fund Entrepreneurs and Potential Investors Might Ask Each Other
Yale SOM case study: Questions Aspiring Search Fund Entrepreneurs and Potential Investors Might Ask Each Other. Part of the school's entrepreneurship-through-acquisition and search fund case series.
Read the case study → - Case study2025
Scott Duncan - Exploring a Search Fund Bankruptcy
Yale SOM case study: Scott Duncan - Exploring a Search Fund Bankruptcy. Part of the school's entrepreneurship-through-acquisition and search fund case series.
Read the case study → - Case study2025
Search Fund Company Boards: How CEOs Can Build Boards to Help Them Thrive
Yale SOM case study: Search Fund Company Boards: How CEOs Can Build Boards to Help Them Thrive. Part of the school's entrepreneurship-through-acquisition and search fund case series.
Read the case study → - Research paper2025
Selling to Yourself: Continuation Funds in Private Equity
Studies continuation funds, in which a manager raises a new fund to buy assets from its own existing fund, a structure that grew from five funds in 2018 to 130 in 2024. Using a hand-collected sample of 472 continuation funds, the authors test a model in which heterogeneous LP preferences drive these deals. Continuation funds emerge when LPs are more heterogeneous and managers have earned carried interest they can roll; LPs typically choose to exit rather than reinvest, driven by LP-level frictions and time-varying liquidity demands.
Read the paper → - Case study2025
Smith Brothers Insurance: Managing Successions at a Growing Insurance Agency
Yale SOM case study: Smith Brothers Insurance: Managing Successions at a Growing Insurance Agency. Part of the school's entrepreneurship-through-acquisition and search fund case series.
Read the case study → - Case study2025
Some Thoughts on How to be an Effective and Impactful Director on a Search Fund Board
Yale SOM case study: Some Thoughts on How to be an Effective and Impactful Director on a Search Fund Board. Part of the school's entrepreneurship-through-acquisition and search fund case series.
Read the case study → - Case study2025
Some Thoughts on Managing Blue-Collar Team Members in a Search Fund-Acquired Business
Yale SOM case study: Some Thoughts on Managing Blue-Collar Team Members in a Search Fund-Acquired Business. Part of the school's entrepreneurship-through-acquisition and search fund case series.
Read the case study → - Case study2025
Stotz Equipment's Growth through Acquisition Strategy (A)
Yale SOM case study: Stotz Equipment's Growth through Acquisition Strategy (A). Part of the school's entrepreneurship-through-acquisition and search fund case series.
Read the case study → - Case study2025
Stotz Equipment's Growth through Acquisition Strategy (B)
Yale SOM case study: Stotz Equipment's Growth through Acquisition Strategy (B). Part of the school's entrepreneurship-through-acquisition and search fund case series.
Read the case study → - Case study2025
Sumit Aneja: Getting the Right Investors
Yale SOM case study: Sumit Aneja: Getting the Right Investors. Part of the school's entrepreneurship-through-acquisition and search fund case series.
Read the case study → - Case study2025
Ten Essential Questions to Consider When Selecting a Franchise Brand for a Search Fund Journey
Yale SOM case study: Ten Essential Questions to Consider When Selecting a Franchise Brand for a Search Fund Journey. Part of the school's entrepreneurship-through-acquisition and search fund case series.
Read the case study → - Case study2025
Ten Reasons to Absolutely Not Pursue Entrepreneurship through Acquisition
Yale SOM case study: Ten Reasons to Absolutely Not Pursue Entrepreneurship through Acquisition. Part of the school's entrepreneurship-through-acquisition and search fund case series.
Read the case study → - Case study2025
The Evolution of a Search Fund CEO and Company
Yale SOM case study: The Evolution of a Search Fund CEO and Company. Part of the school's entrepreneurship-through-acquisition and search fund case series.
Read the case study → - Case study2025
The Judd Lorson Story
Yale SOM case study: The Judd Lorson Story. Part of the school's entrepreneurship-through-acquisition and search fund case series.
Read the case study → - Research paper2025
The Lending Technology of Direct Lenders in Private Credit
Compares the lending technology of direct lenders, banks and finance companies using data on secured borrowing by the universe of U.S. private middle-market firms. The rise of direct lenders over 20 years reflects their comparative strength in enterprise-value-based loans to PE-backed firms in intangible-capital industries, with post-crisis bank regulation a quantitatively weaker channel. Direct lenders write collateral claims focused on continuation value after default and are more industry-specialized, giving them an advantage with higher-risk borrowers where continuation value far exceeds liquidation value.
Read the paper → - Research paper2025
The Role of Private Debt in the Financial Ecosystem
Provides a comprehensive introduction to private debt, its growth drivers and the potential accumulation of risk in the broader economy. Private debt is framed as a new technology that extended the high-yield corporate debt market into the middle market, with its evolution closely intertwined with the growth of private equity. Historically banks have not had significant exposure to financing buyouts or other highly leveraged transactions in either large-cap or mid-cap segments.
Read the paper → - Case study2025
Three Concepts Search Fund Entrepreneurs Can Learn from Family Businesses
Yale SOM case study: Three Concepts Search Fund Entrepreneurs Can Learn from Family Businesses. Part of the school's entrepreneurship-through-acquisition and search fund case series.
Read the case study → - Case study2025
What Exactly Search Fund Investors Do and Don't Do for Entrepreneurs
Yale SOM case study: What Exactly Search Fund Investors Do and Don't Do for Entrepreneurs. Part of the school's entrepreneurship-through-acquisition and search fund case series.
Read the case study → - Case study2025
What Is Your Why for Launching a Search Fund?
Yale SOM case study: What Is Your Why for Launching a Search Fund. Part of the school's entrepreneurship-through-acquisition and search fund case series.
Read the case study → - Case study2025
What's Next? Search Fund Entrepreneurs Reflect on Life After Exit
Yale SOM case study: What's Next? Search Fund Entrepreneurs Reflect on Life After Exit. Part of the school's entrepreneurship-through-acquisition and search fund case series.
Read the case study → - Case study2025
What's Next: The Entrepreneur's Epilogue and the Paradox of Success
Yale SOM case study: What's Next: The Entrepreneur's Epilogue and the Paradox of Success. Part of the school's entrepreneurship-through-acquisition and search fund case series.
Read the case study → - Case study2025
When to Give Up on Your Search Fund Dream
Yale SOM case study: When to Give Up on Your Search Fund Dream. Part of the school's entrepreneurship-through-acquisition and search fund case series.
Read the case study → - Research paper2025
Why Are Serial Acquirers Different in the US?
Investigates what structurally distinguishes US serial acquirers from one-off acquirers and from serial acquirers elsewhere.
Read the paper → - Case study2025
Why MBA Students Do Not Pursue Entrepreneurship through Acquisition
Yale SOM case study: Why MBA Students Do Not Pursue Entrepreneurship through Acquisition. Part of the school's entrepreneurship-through-acquisition and search fund case series.
Read the case study → - Case study2025
Working at a Small Business as a Post-MBA Career Choice
Yale SOM case study: Working at a Small Business as a Post-MBA Career Choice. Part of the school's entrepreneurship-through-acquisition and search fund case series.
Read the case study → - Research paper2024
2024 Search Fund Study
Analyzes financial returns and searcher demographics across 681 US and Canadian search funds formed since 1984, reporting a 35.1% IRR.
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Acquisition Relatedness in Family Firms: Do the Environment and the Institutional Context Matter?
Examines how environmental munificence and institutional context shape family firms' preference for related versus unrelated acquisitions.
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ESG Disclosures in the Private Equity Industry
Provides the first systematic evidence on ESG disclosures by a large global sample of private equity firms, using historical websites from 2000 to 2022 and a validated dictionary-based measure of voluntary disclosure. Disclosures trend upward over time, with social topics recently becoming as important as environmental topics, and demand for ESG information from fund investors is a significant determinant. More PE firm ESG disclosure is associated with better ESG outcomes at portfolio companies, suggesting disclosures align with real actions for the average firm.
Read the paper → - Research paper2024
Financial resource pooling in club deals
Uses a hand-collected dataset on leveraged buyouts to test competing explanations for club deal formation: collusion, financial resource pooling and experience. Results support resource pooling: club deals allow members to buy larger targets and reduce equity commitments relative to solo deals, with preference for clubs strengthening as required equity rises. Club deals are associated with higher competition in the private negotiation phase, target announcement returns and premiums are similar to solo deals, and clubs are more likely among less experienced funds.
Read the paper → - Research paper2024
Life cycle of private equity investments in physician practices: an overview of private equity exits
Characterizes private equity exits from physician practices in dermatology, ophthalmology and gastroenterology, the specialties with the most acquisitions between 2016 and 2020. Of 807 acquisitions, 51.6% of PE-acquired practices underwent an exit within three years, and 97.8% of exits were secondary buyouts to other PE firms with larger funds. Between investment and exit, PE firms increased the number of affiliated practices by an average of 595% in three years, highlighting rapid consolidation under PE ownership.
Read the paper → - Research paper2024
Managing Margins: PE Effects on Financial, Physical, and Human Capital
Exploits a historically large leveraged buyout of a national hospital chain to trace how the full life cycle of PE ownership affects hospital-level revenues, technology sourcing, labor use and financial performance. The buyout produced permanent improvements in hospital volumes and revenues. PE also reduced growth in full-time employees with suggestive substitution toward part-time workers and restrained technology adoption while expanding vendor counts, translating into improved operating margins.
Read the paper → - Research paper2024
Private Equity–Acquired Physician Practices And Market Penetration Increased Substantially, 2012–21
Estimates the local market share of private equity firms within ten physician specialties at the metropolitan statistical area level by linking PE acquisition data to physician data. PE-acquired physician practice sites increased from 816 across 119 MSAs in 2012 to 5,779 across 307 MSAs in 2021. Single PE firms exceeded 30% market share in 108 MSA-specialty markets and 50% in 50 of those, raising competition concerns and calls for scrutiny by the FTC and state regulators.
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Private Equity for Pension Plans? Evaluating Private Equity Performance from an Investor's Perspective
Evaluates private equity performance from the perspective of individual investors using investor-specific stochastic discount factors, and asks whether pension plans would gain from changing their PE allocation. Plans invest in funds with higher average risk-adjusted performance, mainly because of access to successful managers rather than selection skill. Decomposing returns into risk compensation and alpha, some plans earn higher PE returns by taking more risk without earning higher (sometimes lower) risk-adjusted returns, consistent with agency problems inside plans.
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Riding the Rapids: The Effects of Acquisition Pace and Experience on Serial Acquirer's Performance
Studies nearly 4,000 acquisitions by 403 serial acquirers to show how acquisition pace and experiential learning jointly shape serial acquirer performance.
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Risk-Adjusted Returns of Private Equity Funds: A New Approach
Introduces a new metric, alpha, to benchmark performance of individual private equity funds that is substantially less sensitive to noise in fund cash flows than the public market equivalent (PME) and its generalization (GPME), while sharing GPME's aggregate pricing implications. In a large dataset of fund cash flows, alpha estimates have much lower cross-fund standard deviation than (G)PME. For buyout funds PME and alpha are close but deviate in certain subsamples; alpha increases regression power and improves predictability of future fund performance.
Read the paper → - Research paper2024
Risk-Adjusting the Returns to Private Debt Funds
Evaluates the risk-adjusted returns of private debt funds, the fastest-growing segment of private capital, using a cash-flow-based replicating-portfolio method. Measured against both equity and debt benchmarks, a typical private debt fund produces an insignificant abnormal return to investors net of fees. Gross-of-fee abnormal returns are positive, and using debt benchmarks alone also yields positive abnormal returns because funds contain equity risk; lending rates cover fees and risks but not both fees and investors' risk-adjusted required returns.
Read the paper → - Research paper2023
A Survey of Private Debt Funds
Surveys U.S. and European private debt investors, primarily direct lending funds, with over $300 billion in private debt AUM about sourcing, selection, monitoring, interaction with PE sponsors and views on the market. Respondents mainly provide cash-flow-based loans they believe banks would not fund, target unlevered returns that appear high relative to risk, and use fund leverage well below banks and CLOs. They negotiate both financial and incurrence covenants; PE sponsors help them lend more and craft better covenants, while European funds rely less on sponsors and compete more with banks.
Read the paper → - Research paper2023
Benchmarking private equity: The direct alpha method
Proposes Direct Alpha, a simple measure of the annualized excess return of investments in private equity funds and similar vehicles holding hard-to-value assets. The method is grounded in theory and dominates existing approaches for converting fund lifetime returns into inputs suitable for portfolio-wide optimization, whereas existing public market equivalent approaches are either heuristic or involve significant approximation errors. Using real-world PE fund cash flow data, the authors compare Direct Alpha against nearly all PME methods in broad use.
Read the paper → - Research paper2023
Decomposing value gains – The case of the best leveraged buy-out ever
Uses Blackstone's leveraged buyout of Hilton, which produced a $14 billion capital gain, the largest ever in private equity, to illustrate how to decompose sources of value creation in LBOs. The deal involved high leverage, layoffs, allegations of corporate espionage and the revival of an iconic brand in a cyclical business through the financial crisis. The authors ask who deserves credit for the gain and argue the answer shows both the difficulty and importance of careful attribution of value creation.
Read the paper → - Research paper2023
Entrepreneurship through acquisition: a scoping review
Scoping review of the academic literature on entrepreneurship-through-acquisition, mapping definitions, motives and outcomes.
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Market Discipline in the Direct Lending Space
Uses the exclusion of business development companies from stock indexes to study market discipline in direct lending. Amid institutional sell-offs, a drop in BDC valuations limits their ability to raise new equity; following this funding shock BDCs do not adjust capital structure but reduce portfolio risk exposure, more so when subject to stronger discipline from debtholders. BDCs pass the capital shock through to portfolio firms by reducing investment intensity.
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Merger Effects and Antitrust Enforcement: Evidence from US Consumer Packaged Goods
Studies 47 large consumer-goods mergers and finds small average price effects but wide variation, informing how antitrust agencies calibrate enforcement thresholds.
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Mergers and acquisitions: does performance depend on managerial ability?
Tests whether acquiring-firm managerial ability explains variation in post-merger performance outcomes.
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Solving Serial Acquirer Puzzles
Shows different types of serial acquirers are driven by different motives and target different sized firms, resolving conflicting prior findings.
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The Market for CEOs: Evidence from Private Equity
Studies the CEO labor market in U.S. companies acquired by PE firms in large leveraged buyouts, a group largely ignored by prior CEO research. 71% of those companies hired new CEOs under PE ownership, more than 75% of new CEOs were external hires and 67% were complete outsiders, in sharp contrast to the internal-promotion norm at S&P 500 companies. Buyout CEO compensation is estimated to be much higher than at similarly sized public companies and slightly below S&P 500 CEOs, suggesting firm-specific human capital is relatively unimportant for PE portfolio companies.
Read the paper → - Research paper2022
Cross-Border Mergers and Acquisitions
A comprehensive review of the economics of cross-border M&A, covering why firms acquire internationally, how currency movements, governance quality, and cultural/geographic distance affect deal flow and outcomes, and open questions for future research. A current, well-sourced survey of the international M&A literature.
Read the paper → - Research paper2022
Do Private Equity Managers Raise Funds on (Sur)real Returns? Evidence from Deal-Level Data
Tests the suspicion that PE fund managers manipulate performance estimates around fundraising using deal-level rather than aggregated fund data. In contrast to prior fund-level findings, the author finds no evidence of inflated performance at the deal level. Fund performance peaks around fundraising are instead driven by a cohort effect: late investments made under pressure before fundraising earn lower returns than earlier investments in the fund's life.
Read the paper → - Case study2022
Entrepreneurship Through Acquisition: Brian's Journey
Multimedia HBS case tracing an MBA graduate's search, acquisition and operation of a small company through the ETA path.
Read the case study → - Research paper2022
Family Business Restructuring: A Review and Research Agenda
Reviews the family-business restructuring literature, including acquisitions and divestitures, and sets an agenda for future research.
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How do Private Equity Fees vary across Public Pensions?
Studies how investment fees vary across investors within the same private-capital fund, using net-of-fee return data from public pensions. Return clustering suggests most funds have two tiers of fees, decomposed into management and performance-based components; venture funds and high-demand managers are less likely to use multiple schedules. Some investors consistently pay lower fees within their funds, and size, experience and past performance explain only part of this, pointing to negotiation skill or bargaining power. Later published in the Journal of Finance (2024) as 'Fee Variation in Private Equity'.
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Post-acquisition integration: Managing cultural differences and employee resistance using integration controls
Examines how integration controls are used to manage cultural clashes and employee resistance during post-acquisition integration.
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Pricing and value creation in private equity-backed buy-and-build strategies
Investigates pricing and value creation in private equity-backed buy-and-build strategies using 3,399 buyouts between 1997 and 2020 plus proprietary performance data. PE firms pay sizable premiums for buy-and-build platforms, with transaction multiples similar to those paid by strategic acquirers for matched targets, yet generate above-average equity returns through both higher top-line growth and multiple expansion. Interviews with 32 PE managers provide field evidence on buy-and-build rationale, valuation, pricing and execution.
Read the paper → - Research paper2022
Sources of Value Creation in Private Equity Buyouts of Private Firms
Examines how private equity buyouts of private (rather than public) firms create value. PE acquirers disproportionately target private firms with weak operating profitability and firms with growth potential that are highly levered and dependent on external financing. Targets grow rapidly post-buyout, especially those undertaking add-on acquisitions, and profitability rises for both profitable and unprofitable targets, suggesting value comes from relaxing financing constraints and improving weak firms while financial engineering plays a limited role.
Read the paper → - Research paper2021
A new method for measuring CEO overconfidence: Evidence from acquisitions
Proposes a new acquisition-based measure of CEO overconfidence and validates it against deal-making behavior.
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Buyouts: A Primer
Provides an introduction to buyouts and the academic literature about them. The paper describes the limited-partnership institutional environment that fosters buyouts and aligns incentives for general partners and managers, and catalogs the strategies funds use to increase portfolio company value. It presents up-to-date statistics on the buyout industry, which raises more than $400 billion annually, and summarizes research on whether buyouts earn risk-adjusted abnormal returns and the sources of those returns.
Read the paper → - Research paper2021
Discount Rate Risk in Private Equity: Evidence from Secondary Market Transactions
Argues that standard cash-flow-based PE performance measures overlook discount rate risk. An index built from prices paid in secondary market transactions for fund stakes shows PE discount rates vary considerably; while the standard alpha of the index is zero, cash-flow-based performance measures for the same funds are large and positive. Similar results using synthetic small-cap funds suggest ignoring discount-rate variation can lead to capital misallocation. Later published in the Journal of Finance (2023).
Read the paper → - Research paper2021
Management team cultural alignment and mergers and acquisitions
Finds that cultural fit between acquirer and target management teams boosts announcement returns and post-merger operating performance.
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Owner Incentives and Performance in Healthcare: Private Equity Investment in Nursing Homes
Studies how private equity ownership affects U.S. nursing homes using patient-level Medicare data. PE ownership leads to lower-risk patient mix yet increases mortality; instrumenting for the patient-facility match yields a local average treatment effect on mortality of 11%. Declines in patient well-being measures, nurse staffing and compliance with care standards help explain the mortality effect. Later published in the Review of Financial Studies (2023).
Read the paper → - Research paper2021
Private Equity Buyouts and Workplace Safety
Presents evidence of a large, persistent decline in establishment-level workplace injury rates after private equity buyouts of publicly traded U.S. firms. Firms experience fewer OSHA safety violations after buyouts, and larger declines in injury rates are associated with a higher probability of exit via IPO. Employment reductions after buyouts are concentrated in relatively low-injury-risk establishments; interviews with executives and cross-sectional analysis explore possible causes.
Read the paper → - Research paper2021
Replicating Private Equity with Value Investing, Homemade Leverage, and Hold-to-Maturity Accounting
Argues that asset selection and incremental leverage explain more of buyout investment performance than typically assumed. Buyout funds select small firms with distinct value characteristics, and public equities with these characteristics earn high risk-adjusted returns relative to common factors; adding leverage to such a portfolio raises both risk and mean returns. Direct investments in PE funds earn lower mean returns than a replicating strategy using public equities, brokerage loans and hold-to-maturity accounting.
Read the paper → - Research paper2020
Adverse selection and the performance of private equity co-investments
Uses a large sample of buyout and venture capital co-investments to test whether co-investment deals offered to LPs are adversely selected relative to the rest of the fund. In contrast to Fang, Ivashina and Lerner (2015), the authors find no evidence of adverse selection: gross return distributions of co-investments and other deals are similar. Co-investments carry lower costs, and simulated net returns show reasonably sized co-investment portfolios significantly outperform fund returns.
Read the paper → - Research paper2020
Barbarians at the Store? Private Equity, Products, and Consumers
Uses price and sales data on a large number of consumer products to measure how private equity buyouts affect product markets. Following a buyout, target firms increase sales 50% more than matched controls, and the growth is driven by new product launches and geographic expansion rather than price increases (roughly 1% on existing products). Competitors lose shelf space and marginally raise prices; the evidence suggests PE tailors strategy to the environment, eases financial constraints and provides expertise to manage growth.
Read the paper → - Research paper2020
Has Persistence Persisted in Private Equity? Evidence from Buyout and Venture Capital Funds
Re-examines persistence of U.S. buyout and venture fund performance using Burgiss cash-flow data through June 2019. Using ex post final performance, persistence appears strong as in earlier research, but using only the information available at fundraising (the prior fund's interim performance) there is little or no persistence for buyouts, overall and post-2000. For post-2000 buyouts the rule of investing in prior top-quartile funds does not hold, whereas venture capital persistence survives even on fundraising-time information. Later published in the Journal of Corporate Finance (2023).
Read the paper → - Case study2020
How to Prepare for a Search Fund During Your MBA
Yale case advising MBA students on steps to prepare for launching a search fund and acquiring a small business after graduation.
Read the case study → - Research paper2020
International Search Funds – 2020: Selected Observations
IESE's biennial study of search funds formed outside the United States and Canada, conducted in partnership with Stanford GSB using a quantitative survey method. Drawing on data from 132 first-time international search funds across 25 countries on five continents, as of December 31, 2019, it reports financial returns and characteristics of international search funds and their entrepreneurs. It is the fifth note in the series and complements the Stanford search fund study of North American funds.
Read the paper → - Research paper2020
Long-run Returns to Private Equity in Emerging Markets
Provides the first evidence on long-run returns to private equity in emerging and frontier markets using cash flows from every equity investment by the International Finance Corporation across 130 countries over 58 years. Risk-adjusted returns are comparable to the S&P 500, at least from 1961 to 2010. Returns improve with economic growth but decline as banking systems deepen and capital controls are relaxed, consistent with financial frictions limiting capital flows to poor countries. Later published in Management Science (2026).
Read the paper → - Case study2020
LVMH: The Tiffany Acquisition
Negotiation-simulation case on LVMH's 2019–2021 acquisition of Tiffany & Co. for roughly $15.8B, teaching merger-gain valuation and deal-repricing tactics.
Read the case study → - Case study2020
On the Nature of a Search Fund Not Working Out as Planned
Yale case examining a search fund acquisition that failed to perform as the searcher-CEO had planned.
Read the case study → - Case study2020
Salesforce To Buy Slack – A Case Study In Value Destruction? (Part 1)
Critical analysis of Salesforce's $27.7B 2021 acquisition of Slack, questioning whether the price paid to compete with Microsoft Teams justified the strategic bet.
Read the case study → - Research paper2020
Sustaining the Family Business through Open Innovation: The Role of Technological Acquisitions in Shareholder Value Creation
Analyzes 614 technological acquisitions by 71 family businesses to test whether markets reward family-firm tech acquisitions with more value.
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The (Missing) Relation Between Acquisition Announcement Returns and Value Creation
Finds that stock market reactions to acquisition announcements do not reliably predict the actual long-run value created or destroyed by the deal.
Read the paper → - Case study2019
An Economic Analysis of the T-Mobile-Sprint Merger
Economic analysis of T-Mobile's 2020 acquisition of Sprint, evaluating projected 5G synergies and competitive effects of reducing the market from four carriers to three.
Read the case study → - Research paper2019
Do insiders time management buyouts and freezeouts to buy undervalued targets?
Tests whether managers and controlling shareholders time management buyouts and freezeouts to exploit industry-wide undervaluation. Portfolios of industry peers of MBO and freezeout targets show significant alphas of around 1% per month over the 12 months following the transaction, not explained by standard risk factors. Abnormal peer returns are a reliable proxy for those of the target, and MBOs and freezeouts are announced during troughs of industry profitability.
Read the paper → - Research paper2019
Dry powder and short fuses: Private equity funds in emerging markets
Offers an agency-model explanation for why domestic private equity funds in emerging markets often have much shorter lifespans ('short fuses') than developed-market funds. Under a long fuse, managers can game performance-based compensation by timing investments and burning money when early investments fail; a short fuse restricts timing opportunism but alleviates money-burning only with concavified compensation or substantial hurdle returns. Where agency costs are high, managers accept short fuses to minimize agency costs, and the model predicts convergence to long-lifespan contracts as emerging-market institutions and manager experience improve.
Read the paper → - Case study2019
IBM's Acquisition of Red Hat is a Pivot to Growth...But Many Questions Remain
Assesses IBM's $34B 2019 acquisition of Red Hat, its largest ever, aimed at establishing hybrid-cloud leadership through OpenShift and Kubernetes.
Read the case study → - Research paper2019
Private equity and human capital risk
Studies the human capital effects of private equity buyouts in Germany with matched difference-in-differences estimations at the establishment and employee level covering more than 152,000 buyout employees. Buyouts are followed by lower overall employment and higher turnover, and target employees experience earnings declines equivalent to 2.8% of median earnings by the fifth year. Managers and older employees fare far worse even though they are not more likely to lose their jobs, and there is evidence of fewer administrative staff and more hiring for IT-skilled jobs.
Read the paper → - Research paper2019
The Deregulation of the Private Equity Markets and the Decline in IPOs
Argues that securities-law deregulation, particularly the National Securities Markets Improvement Act of 1996, increased the supply of private capital to late-stage private companies, allowing them to grow to sizes few private firms previously reached. This shifted the going-public versus staying-private trade-off toward an equilibrium with fewer and older IPOs. The authors conclude this does not reflect IPO market failure; founders are using greater bargaining power over investors to stay private longer.
Read the paper → - Research paper2019
The (Heterogeneous) Economic Effects of Private Equity Buyouts
Finds employment falls after buyouts of publicly listed firms but rises after buyouts of privately held firms, with productivity gains largest amid tight credit conditions.
Read the paper → - Research paper2018
Investing Outside the Box: Evidence from Alternative Vehicles in Private Capital
Analyzes alternative investment vehicles in private equity (co-investments, separate accounts and similar structures) using custodial data on 112 limited partners over four decades. Of roughly 5,500 investments, 32% (17% of commitments) were in alternative vehicles, with allocations rising more than 10 percentage points in the last decade, mostly offered by larger North American buyout funds. Average performance of alternative vehicles lagged the GPs' main funds, and LPs with better past performance obtained better-performing vehicles, consistent with bargaining based on outside options. Later published in the Journal of Financial Economics (2022).
Read the paper → - Case study2018
Legal and Financial Fallout of the Bayer-Monsanto Merger: A Cautionary Tale in M&A Due Diligence
Examines Bayer's $63B 2018 acquisition of Monsanto, which triggered over $10B in Roundup litigation settlements due to underestimated legal risk.
Read the case study → - Research paper2018
Private equity portfolio company fees
Documents fees that general partners collect directly from portfolio companies whose boards they control. These fees total $20 billion, evenly distributed over time, representing over 6% of equity invested by GPs, and do not vary with business cycles, company characteristics or GP performance. Fees vary significantly and persistently across GPs even after rebates to LPs; GPs charging the least raised more capital post-crisis and are backed by more skilled LPs, and GPs increase fees before going public.
Read the paper → - Case study2018
Sears: A Case Study in Business Failure
Analyzes the 2004 Kmart-Sears merger, widely criticized as combining two struggling retailers, and its role in Sears Holdings' eventual 2018 bankruptcy.
Read the case study → - Research paper2017
Acquisition Motives and the Distribution of Acquisition Performance
Shows deals motivated by operating synergies produce a wider spread of highly positive and highly negative long-term returns than financial-synergy deals.
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Amazon Buys Whole Foods
HBS case (518-056) on Amazon's $13.7B purchase of Whole Foods in 2017 and the strategic logic of combining e-commerce scale with physical grocery.
Read the case study → - Research paper2017
An Empirical Analysis of Investment Return Dispersion in Emerging Market Private Equity
Uses transaction-level data to compare the dispersion of private equity returns in emerging markets with developed markets by regressing within-market absolute deviation from the mean on an emerging-market indicator and controls. The evidence suggests the distribution of transaction-level TVPI has lower variance within emerging markets than within developed markets, with some caveats. The authors suggest further research on the relative riskiness of emerging-market PE.
Read the paper → - Research paper2017
How persistent is private equity performance? Evidence from deal-level data
Analyzes buyout performance persistence using a database of cash flows on 13,523 portfolio company investments by 865 buyout funds. Focusing on unique realized deals, the authors find that persistence of fund managers has declined substantially as the PE sector has matured and become more competitive. Private equity has largely conformed to the pattern of other asset classes in which past performance is a poor predictor of future results.
Read the paper → - Research paper2017
Inorganic growth strategies and the evolution of the private equity business model
Investigates inorganic growth strategies in which a buyout platform makes subsequent add-on acquisitions, using 9,548 buyouts and 4,937 add-ons over 16 years in 86 countries. Add-on probability is high when the sponsor is experienced and reputable, the platform is large with prior M&A experience and operates in a moderately fragmented industry, and financing conditions are favorable; similar factors explain add-on productivity and speed. Add-on acquisitions increase the probability of exit via IPO and secondary buyout, the latter driven by subsequent owners continuing the buy-and-build strategy.
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Private Equity and Financial Fragility during the Crisis
Asks whether private equity firms contribute to financial fragility during crises by studying PE-backed companies through the 2008 financial crisis. PE-backed companies increased investment relative to peers and experienced greater equity and debt inflows, with stronger effects for financially constrained firms and those whose sponsors had more resources at the crisis onset. PE-backed companies consequently saw higher asset growth and gained market share during the crisis.
Read the paper → - Case study2017
Searching for a Search Fund Structure: A Student Takes a Tour of Various Options
Yale case in which an MBA student compares traditional, self-funded and other search fund structures before choosing an approach.
Read the case study → - Research paper2017
Skill and luck in private equity performance
Uses a new variance-decomposition model to separate skill from luck in the persistence of private equity firm performance. Long-term persistence is high: the spread in expected net-of-fee future returns between top- and bottom-quartile PE firms is 7-8 percentage points annually, after controlling for spurious persistence from overlapping contemporaneous funds. Performance is noisy, however, making it hard for investors to identify funds with top-quartile expected performance, leaving little investable persistence.
Read the paper → - Research paper2017
The coming wave of small business succession and the role of stakeholder synergy theory
Frames the looming wave of small-business ownership transfers through a stakeholder synergy lens on succession and sale.
Read the paper → - Research paper2017
The Process of Postmerger Integration: A Review and Agenda for Future Research
Reviews decades of post-merger integration research and argues the integration process itself remains a poorly understood 'black box'.
Read the paper → - Research paper2017
Three Trends in Middle Market Private Equity
A practitioner article identifying three trends in middle-market private equity as firms compete in a complex deal environment: establishing industry specializations, leveraging operating partners, and engaging outsourced consultants. The author expects firms to continue employing creative solutions to source and close investments and build value within portfolios.
Read the paper → - Case study2016
Microsoft's Acquisition of LinkedIn: Integrated Case Studies
Covers Microsoft's $26.2B 2016 acquisition of LinkedIn, its largest ever at the time, aimed at combining professional-network data with enterprise software and AI.
Read the case study → - Research paper2016
Pay Now or Pay Later?: The Economics within the Private Equity Partnership
Examines the internal economics of 717 private equity partnerships, focusing on how fund economics are allocated among partners. The allocation of carried interest and ownership is largely divorced from partners' past investment success and instead driven by founder status. Underprovision of carry and ownership, and inequality in fund economics generally, leads senior partners to depart, and those departures reduce the firm's ability to raise subsequent funds. Later published in the Journal of Financial Economics (2019).
Read the paper → - Research paper2016
The Liquidity Cost of Private Equity Investments: Evidence from Secondary Market Transactions
Uses proprietary data from a leading intermediary to measure transaction costs in the secondary market for private equity fund stakes. Most transactions occur at a discount to NAV; buyers average an annualized PME of 1.023 versus 0.974 for sellers, implying buyers outperform sellers by about five percentage points annually (about three for the most common sales of four-to-nine-year-old fund stakes). Discounts and return differences relate to asymmetric information and market depth; buyers tend to be funds-of-funds while sellers are endowments and pension funds. Later published in the Journal of Financial Economics (2019).
Read the paper → - Research paper2016
The Operational Consequences of Private Equity Buyouts: Evidence from the Restaurant Industry
Documents operational changes after private equity buyouts of restaurant chains using comprehensive health inspection records. Store-level practices improve after buyouts, with restaurants becoming cleaner, safer and better maintained; the effect is stronger in chain-owned stores than in franchised locations over which PE owners have limited control, supporting a causal interpretation. Improvements are particularly apparent when PE partners have prior industry experience, suggesting PE adds value by bringing industry expertise.
Read the paper → - Research paper2015
An Investor’s Guide to Search Funds
Expands search fund research beyond selection mechanics and post-mortems to evaluate search funds from an investor's portfolio perspective. The authors review the background of search fund investing and present a self-assessment model for investors plus a guide to screening, monitoring and exiting search fund investments. Participants maintain that the model aligns investor and entrepreneur interests, but rate honesty and ethics as the most important investment considerations and value sales skills and operational experience over financial or deal-making skills.
Read the paper → - Research paper2015
Can Serial Acquirers Be Profiled?
Classifies serial acquirers into loners, occasional acquirers, sprinters and marathoners based on acquisition frequency and learning behavior.
Read the paper → - Research paper2015
Do managers manipulate earnings prior to management buyouts?
Asks whether managers planning to buy their company through a levered management buyout manipulate earnings downward to buy the firm cheaply, comparing MBOs with institutional buyouts and non-buyout firms in the UK. The authors find strong negative earnings management through both accruals and real activities in MBOs, modest negative accrual management in institutional buyouts, and positive earnings management in non-buyout firms. High external borrowing needs do not mitigate the downward manipulation, and the revised 2003 UK Corporate Governance Code somewhat reduced it while shifting toward harder-to-detect real earnings management.
Read the paper → - Research paper2015
Giants at the Gate: Investment Returns and Diseconomies of Scale in Private Equity
Documents the wide dispersion of private equity investment returns using a newly constructed database of 7,500 investments worldwide. One in ten investments returns no money while one in four has an IRR above 50%, and quick flips are associated with the highest returns. Performance does not appear scalable: investments held during periods when the PE firm has many simultaneous investments underperform substantially, consistent with organizational diseconomies of scale.
Read the paper → - Research paper2015
Investor Scale and Performance in Private Equity Investments
Documents that defined benefit pension plans with significant private equity holdings earn substantially greater PE returns than plans with small holdings, in both the 1990s and 2000s; a one-standard-deviation increase in PE holdings is associated with 4% greater annual returns. Up to one-third of the outperformance comes from lower costs from avoiding funds-of-funds and investing directly. The bulk comes from superior gross returns only partly explained by access and experience, which the authors attribute to superior due diligence and ability to bridge information asymmetries.
Read the paper → - Case study2015
Microsoft Writes Off $7.6B, Admits Failure of Nokia Acquisition
Reports on Microsoft's $7.6B write-off in 2015 of its 2014 Nokia handset acquisition, following low Windows Phone adoption and integration difficulties.
Read the case study → - Research paper2015
What Do Private Equity Firms Say They Do?
Surveys 79 private equity investors with combined AUM above $750 billion about valuation, capital structure, governance and value creation practices. Investors rely primarily on IRR and multiples rather than DCF, their LPs focus on absolute performance, and capital structure choice is based equally on trade-off and market-timing considerations. PE investors expect to add value with a greater focus on growth than on cost cutting; the paper also groups stated actions into firm strategies linked to founder characteristics. Later published in the Journal of Financial Economics (2016).
Read the paper → - Research paper2014
Do Private Equity Returns Result from Wealth Transfers and Short-Termism? Evidence from a Comprehensive Sample of Large Buyouts
Tests whether private equity sponsors' returns come from wealth transfers from debt investors and buyers of portfolio companies, or from short-termism, using a comprehensive sample of large buyouts. Public companies on average benefit when buying sponsors' portfolio companies, with positive announcement returns and zero long-run abnormal returns, and large payouts to PE have no relation to future portfolio company distress. Portfolio companies invest no differently than matched public firms, inconsistent with short-termism, although some wealth transfers appear in special situations.
Read the paper → - Research paper2014
Private Equity Performance: What Do We Know?
Studies nearly 1,400 US buyout and venture funds and finds buyout fund outperformance versus the S&P 500 averaging over 20% across a fund's life.
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The evolution of capital structure and operating performance after leveraged buyouts: Evidence from U.S. corporate tax returns
Uses U.S. corporate tax return data to study financial structure and performance after 317 leveraged buyouts between 1995 and 2007, including firms without public financial statements. The authors find little evidence of operating improvements after LBOs across the full sample, although improvements do appear in the subset with public financial statements. Firms do not reduce leverage after LBOs even when generating excess cash, suggesting a sustained change in capital structure is a deliberate objective of the LBO structure.
Read the paper → - Research paper2013
Is Cultural Distance a Bane or a Boon for Cross-Border Acquisition Performance?
Finds cultural distance harms cross-border acquisition performance for inexperienced acquirers but can benefit more internationally experienced ones.
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Limited Partner Performance and the Maturing of the Private Equity Industry
Evaluates limited partners' PE investment performance using 14,380 investments by 1,852 LPs in 1,250 buyout and venture funds started between 1991 and 2006. The well-known outperformance of endowments in 1991-1998 is mostly due to greater access to top venture capital partnerships. In 1999-2006 endowments no longer outperform and show neither better access nor better selection than other institutional investors, consistent with the maturing of PE into a mainstream institutional asset class.
Read the paper → - Research paper2013
Performance of Buyout Funds Revisited?
Shows that publicly available buyout fund return data suffice to replicate findings from proprietary datasets: the average buyout fund outperforms the S&P 500. However, buyout funds mainly invest in small and value companies, and the average buyout fund return is similar to small-cap indices and the oldest small-cap passive mutual fund. When the benchmark is changed to levered small and value indices, the average buyout fund underperforms by 3.1% per year.
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Private Equity, Jobs, and Productivity
Extends the Davis et al. employment work to productivity, again using Census microdata on 3,200 U.S. buyout targets and 150,000 establishments from 1980 to 2005. Net relative job loss at targets is a modest 1% over two years, but gross job creation plus destruction exceeds controls by 14%. Buyouts also raise total factor productivity at target firms and reduce earnings per worker, with productivity gains arising mainly from accelerated exit of less productive establishments and entry of more productive ones.
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The Disintermediation of Financial Markets: Direct Investing in Private Equity
Examines institutional investors' shift toward direct PE investing using a proprietary dataset of direct investments from seven large institutions. Solo direct investments outperform co-investments and a wide range of benchmarks for traditional PE partnership investments, driven by deals with less severe informational problems (proximate, later-stage) and by avoiding periods of heavy capital inflows. Co-investments perform poorly, which appears to result from fund managers selectively offering large deals to institutions. Later published in the Journal of Financial Economics (2015).
Read the paper → - Research paper2012
Corporate Governance and Value Creation: Evidence from Private Equity
Uses deal-level data from transactions by large private equity houses to measure abnormal deal performance after controlling for leverage and sector returns, finding it positive on average. Higher abnormal performance is linked to improvements in sales and operating margin during the private phase relative to quoted peers. Deal partners who are ex-consultants or ex-industry managers are associated with outperforming deals built on internal value-creation programs, while ex-bankers and ex-accountants are associated with outperforming deals involving significant M&A.
Read the paper → - Research paper2012
Determinants of Cross-Border Mergers and Acquisitions
Analyzes nearly 57,000 cross-border mergers from 1990-2007 and finds geography, accounting disclosure quality, and bilateral trade increase merger likelihood between countries.
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Do Private Equity Managers Earn Their Fees? Compensation, Ownership, and Cash Flow Performance
Links ownership structures, management contracts and quarterly cash flows for a large sample of buyout and venture funds from 1984-2010 to test whether GP compensation is excessive. Higher compensation and lower managerial ownership are not associated with worse net-of-fee performance; compensation is largely unrelated to net-of-fee cash flow performance. Pay rises and shifts toward fixed components during fundraising booms, and distribution behavior around fee and carry triggers is consistent with agency conflicts, but overall higher-paid managers appear to earn back their pay through higher gross performance. Later published in the Review of Financial Studies (2013).
Read the paper → - Research paper2012
Do private equity owners increase risk of financial distress and bankruptcy?
Investigates financial distress risk around European buyouts between 2000 and 2008 and whether buyout companies go bankrupt more often than comparable firms. Private equity investors select companies that are less financially distressed than comparable non-buyout firms, and distress risk increases after the buyout. Despite this, PE-backed companies do not have higher bankruptcy rates, and those backed by experienced funds have even lower rates, suggesting experienced investors manage distress risk better.
Read the paper → - Case study2012
Facebook and the $1 Billion Instagram Acquisition
Studies Facebook's decision to pay $1B for the pre-revenue, 13-employee Instagram in 2012, now widely regarded as one of tech's shrewdest acquisitions.
Read the case study → - Case study2012
HP's Purchase of Autonomy: 'Hubris at the Top' and Failure of Internal Controls
Examines HP's $11.1B acquisition of Autonomy and the subsequent $8.8B goodwill write-off tied to alleged accounting improprieties and overly optimistic synergy projections.
Read the case study → - Research paper2012
R&D and the Incentives from Merger and Acquisition Activity
Models and tests how an active M&A market raises small firms' R&D incentives since they can sell innovations to larger acquirers.
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Secondary buyouts: Why buy and at what price?
Studies the economic logic and pricing of secondary buyouts, testing efficiency gains, liquidity-based market timing and collusion as explanations. The results are most consistent with liquidity-based market timing: firms are more likely to exit through secondary buyouts when the equity market is cold, debt markets are favorable and sellers face high demand for liquidity, with no strong efficiency gains for targets. Secondary buyouts are priced higher than first-time buyouts due to favorable debt market conditions, consistent with the view that they mainly serve PE firms' financial needs.
Read the paper → - Research paper2011
Do private equity consortiums facilitate collusion in takeover bidding?
Tests whether joint bidding by private equity consortiums facilitates collusion using 870 takeovers of public targets in 2003-2007, the period investigated by the Justice Department and class-action suits, identifying PE bidders from actual merger documents. Consortium formation is explained by scale, risk and bidder expertise, and both single PE bidders and consortiums are associated with greater takeover competition than other bidders. Lower target returns in consortium deals appear only in narrow announcement windows and vanish over longer windows and after controlling for endogenous consortium formation, inconsistent with collusion.
Read the paper → - Research paper2011
Growth LBOs
Examines corporate behavior after 839 French leveraged buyouts relative to a control group. In the three years after an LBO, targets become more profitable, grow much faster than peers, issue additional debt and increase capital expenditures. Growth is concentrated in private-to-private deals where the seller is an individual and is stronger in industries dependent on external finance, consistent with PE creating value by relaxing credit constraints, in contrast to evidence that LBO targets downsize.
Read the paper → - Research paper2011
IPO Timing, Buyout Sponsors’ Exit Strategies, and Firm Performance of RLBOs
Studies how buyout sponsors' IPO timing affects the LBO restructuring process and subsequent exits for reverse leveraged buyouts (RLBOs). LBO duration is negatively related to hot IPO market conditions, and RLBOs with shorter LBO duration experience greater performance deterioration and higher bankruptcy probability after the IPO, suggesting operational improvement efforts succumb to market timing. IPO timing does not affect sponsors' exit strategies or post-IPO monitoring; sponsors keep an active long-run presence and more reputable sponsors are more likely to exit by facilitating takeovers.
Read the paper → - Research paper2011
Private Equity and Employment
Asks whether leveraged buyouts destroy jobs, using a new dataset of U.S. private equity transactions from 1980 to 2005 covering 3,200 target firms and 150,000 establishments matched to controls. Employment at target establishments falls about 3% over two years and 6% over five years relative to controls, concentrated in public-to-private deals and in service and retail sectors. Once new-establishment job creation and faster acquisition and divestiture are counted, net relative job loss is under 1% of initial employment, while gross job reallocation is far higher; the authors conclude buyouts accelerate creative destruction with modest net employment effects.
Read the paper → - Case study2011
Say Farewell to Lipitor but Don't Forget Its Lessons
HBR retrospective on Pfizer's 2000 hostile takeover of Warner-Lambert to secure full rights to Lipitor, which became the best-selling drug in pharma history.
Read the case study → - Research paper2011
The Big Idea: The New M&A Playbook
Argues most executives misjudge whether an acquisition target's resources, processes, or customer relationships are the real source of value, and offers a decision framework for choosing deal structure and integration approach accordingly. A widely read practitioner-facing update to classic M&A theory.
Read the paper → - Case study2011
The Failure of the Royal Bank of Scotland
Regulatory report examining RBS's ill-timed €70B acquisition of ABN AMRO in 2007, weak due diligence, and the resulting £45B taxpayer bailout.
Read the case study → - Research paper2011
The Performance of Private Equity-Backed IPOs
Examines aftermarket performance of private equity-backed IPOs on the London Stock Exchange from 1992 to 2005 against venture-backed and non-sponsored issues. PE-backed IPOs are larger in sales and assets, more profitable and show relatively modest first-day returns. In the three years after listing they display better operating and market performance than other IPOs and the market as a whole.
Read the paper → - Research paper2011
The Private Equity Advantage: Leveraged Buyout Firms and Relationship Banking
Examines how leveraged buyout firms' bank relationships affect the terms of 1,590 syndicated loans financing PE-sponsored buyouts between 1993 and 2005. Sponsor-bank relationships are an important source of cross-sectional variation in loan spreads and covenants: a one-standard-deviation increase in relationship strength is associated with an 8-basis-point (3%) lower spread and a looser maximum debt-to-EBITDA covenant. Banks also price loans to cross-sell fee business, and relationship strength plus cross-selling potential can translate into as much as a 4-percentage-point higher equity return for the sponsor.
Read the paper → - Research paper2011
The Private Equity Secondaries Market During the Financial Crisis and the “Valuation Gap”
Analyzes the private equity secondaries market during the 2008-09 financial crisis, showing effective market liquidity contracted severely in early 2009 to a fraction of earlier volume. The authors propose a behavioral explanation for the 'valuation gap' between seller and buyer valuations based on framing and loss aversion combined with accounting-based elements. The market recovered quickly with no more protracted turbulence than the stock market, which the authors interpret as evidence of efficient liquidity and resilience.
Read the paper → - Research paper2010
Borrow Cheap, Buy High? The Determinants of Leverage and Pricing in Buyouts
Analyzes the financial structure of 1,157 large worldwide private equity deals from 1980 to 2008. Buyout leverage is cross-sectionally unrelated to the leverage of matched public firms and is driven mainly by the economy-wide cost of borrowing, which affects both the quantity and composition of debt. Credit conditions also strongly affect prices paid in buyouts, and high leverage negatively affects fund performance controlling for vintage, consistent with financing availability driving PE booms and busts and agency problems between GPs and LPs. Later published in the Journal of Finance (2013).
Read the paper → - Research paper2010
Club Deals in Leveraged Buyouts
Finds target shareholders receive roughly 10% less in leveraged buyouts done by consortiums of private equity firms ('club deals') than in sole-sponsor buyouts, especially before 2006.
Read the paper → - Case study2010
Kraft Foods Inc. and Cadbury PLC (A): A Nutritious Association?
Covers Kraft's contested 2010 hostile takeover of British confectioner Cadbury, examining the strategic rationale, cross-border deal tactics, and the UK political backlash over foreign acquisition of a national icon. A prominent case on hostile cross-border M&A and stakeholder politics.
Read the case study → - Case study2010
Kraft's Takeover of Cadbury
Case on Kraft's $19.6B hostile takeover of Cadbury in 2009–2010, covering the bidding fight, cultural clash, and eventual Mondelez spin-off.
Read the case study → - Case study2010
Revisiting Berkshire Hathaway's Acquisition of BNSF
Examines Warren Buffett's 2010 ~$44B acquisition of Burlington Northern Santa Fe, described as an 'all-in wager' on the U.S. economy that doubled BNSF's profits within two years.
Read the case study → - Research paper2010
The Economics of Private Equity Funds
Analyzes the economics of the private equity industry using data from a large investor on 238 funds raised between 1993 and 2006 and a model of expected manager revenue as a function of investor contracts. About two-thirds of expected revenue comes from fixed components not sensitive to performance. Buyout managers grow fund size faster than venture managers, producing significantly higher revenue per partner and per professional in later buyout funds, suggesting the buyout business is more scalable than venture capital.
Read the paper → - Research paper2010
The role of private equity group reputation in LBO financing
Investigates whether the reputation of acquiring private equity groups relates to LBO financing structure using 180 U.S. public-to-private LBOs between 1997 and 2007. Reputable PE groups are more active when credit spreads are low and lending standards lax, pay narrower bank and institutional loan spreads, obtain longer maturities and rely more on institutional loans. Reputation is positively related to buyout leverage, and leverage to pricing, but there is no direct relation between sponsor reputation and buyout valuations.
Read the paper → - Case study2009
Bank of America Acquires Merrill Lynch (A)
HBS case on Bank of America's crisis-era acquisition of Merrill Lynch in September 2008, the deteriorating losses that followed, and the government-brokered decision not to invoke the MAC clause.
Read the case study → - Research paper2009
Beware of Venturing into Private Equity
Describes the contracts between private equity funds and investors and the returns investors earn, starting from the puzzle that average buyout fund performance exceeds the S&P 500 before fees but falls below it after fees. The author asks why payments to buyout funds are so large and why the marginal investor invests, exploring the possibility that some investors are fooled. Fee contracts are shown to be opaque and to bury costly provisions that are hard to justify on incentive-alignment grounds, so it would be premature to assert that agency conflicts are lower in private equity than in public equity.
Read the paper → - Case study2009
Comcast-NBC Universal Joint Venture Deal
Covers Comcast's 2009–2011 acquisition of NBCUniversal from GE for $13.75B, a vertical-integration deal combining cable distribution with content production.
Read the case study → - Research paper2009
Leveraged Buyouts and Private Equity
Reviews the economics of leveraged buyouts and private equity ownership, including capital structure, governance, and performance evidence.
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Why Do Managers Make Serial Acquisitions? An Investigation of Performance Predictability in Serial Acquisitions
Finds no group-level performance persistence among serial acquirers, but bidders that succeed once tend to keep succeeding in later deals.
Read the paper → - Case study2008
Analysis of a Failed Merger: Sprint-Nextel Case
Details Sprint's $35B 2005 acquisition of Nextel and the $29.7B goodwill impairment that followed a severe corporate-culture clash between the two carriers.
Read the case study → - Case study2008
Case Study: Acquisition of Jaguar and Land Rover by Tata Motors
Traces Ford's 2008 sale of Jaguar Land Rover to Tata Motors for $2.3B after failing to generate value from the brands it acquired in 1989 and 2000.
Read the case study → - Research paper2008
Do Buyouts (Still) Create Value?
Asks whether the 1990-2006 wave of public-to-private leveraged buyouts created value, using a sample of 192 deals. These transactions were somewhat more conservatively priced and less levered than 1980s deals; for the subsample with post-buyout data, median market-adjusted returns to pre- and post-buyout capital were 78% and 36%. Operating gains are comparable to or slightly above benchmark firms, and returns are strongly related to increases in industry valuation multiples as well as operating improvements. Later published in the Journal of Finance (2011).
Read the paper → - Research paper2008
Do Cultural Differences Matter in Mergers and Acquisitions? A Tentative Model and Meta-Analytic Examination
A meta-analysis testing whether national and organizational cultural differences hurt or help M&A outcomes, finding mixed and context-dependent effects that challenge the simple assumption that cultural distance always destroys value. An important corrective to earlier culture-clash narratives.
Read the paper → - Research paper2008
Managerial Incentives and Value Creation: Evidence from Private Equity
Compares companies owned by private equity investors with similar public companies. PE-owned companies use much stronger executive incentives and carry substantially higher debt, yet the authors find little evidence they outperform public firms in profitability or operational efficiency. The compensation and debt differences disappear within one to two years after the PE-owned firm goes public, raising questions about whether and how PE incentives create value.
Read the paper → - Case study2008
Mergers and Acquisitions by Anheuser-Busch InBev: Integrated Case Studies
Covers InBev's $52B 2008 acquisition of Anheuser-Busch, forming the world's largest brewer and combining global scale with the iconic Budweiser brand.
Read the case study → - Research paper2008
Private Equity and Long-Run Investment: The Case of Innovation
Tests whether LBOs sacrifice long-term investment by examining patenting activity around 495 private equity transactions. The authors find no evidence that LBOs reduce innovation activity. Patents granted to firms involved in PE transactions are more cited, show no shift in the fundamental nature of research, and are more concentrated in the most important areas of the companies' innovation portfolios. Later published in the Journal of Finance (2011).
Read the paper → - Research paper2008
The Performance of Private Equity Funds
Argues that private equity fund performance as reported by industry associations and prior research is overstated, driven by inflated accounting valuations of ongoing investments and a sample bias toward better-performing funds. The authors estimate average net-of-fees fund performance about 3% per year below the S&P 500, widening to 6% per year after adjusting for risk, with fees estimated at 6% per year. The paper discusses misleading aspects of performance reporting and possible side benefits of PE investing.
Read the paper → - Case study2008
The Renault-Nissan Alliance in 2008: Exploiting the Potential of a Novel Organizational Form
Studies the 1999 Renault-Nissan cross-shareholding alliance under Carlos Ghosn, its turnaround success, and the governance structure later implicated in Ghosn's 2018 arrest.
Read the case study → - Case study2008
The Walt Disney Company and Pixar, Inc.: To Acquire or Not to Acquire?
Analyzes Disney's 2006 decision to acquire Pixar, weighing the strategic value of Pixar's creative culture and technology against the risks of overpaying and disrupting what made Pixar successful. A frequently taught case on valuing intangible, culture-dependent assets in an acquisition.
Read the case study → - Research paper2008
Who Makes Acquisitions? CEO Overconfidence and the Market's Reaction
Uses CEOs' personal stock-option exercise behavior to measure overconfidence and finds that overconfident CEOs are significantly more likely to make value-destroying acquisitions, especially when using internal cash. A landmark paper in behavioral corporate finance applied to M&A.
Read the paper → - Case study2007
An Antitrust Analysis of Google's Proposed Acquisition of DoubleClick
Analyzes Google's $3.1B 2007 acquisition of DoubleClick, which built its dominant ad-serving and exchange business and later drew antitrust findings.
Read the case study → - Research paper2007
CEO overconfidence, CEO dominance and corporate acquisitions
Tests whether CEO overconfidence and dominance over the board jointly explain firms' decisions to pursue acquisitions.
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Why are Buyouts Levered: The Financial Structure of Private Equity Funds
Presents a model of the financial structure of private equity firms in which the general partner encounters deals over time whose quality cannot be credibly communicated to investors. The optimal arrangement combines fund capital raised before deals are found with deal-level financing, gives investors a debt-plus-levered-equity claim and the GP a carry-like claim, and features pooled investments and size limits as in practice. The model implies overinvestment in good states and underinvestment in bad states, amplifying industry cycles, with recession-vintage investments outperforming. Later published in the Journal of Finance (2009).
Read the paper → - Case study2006
Exploring Business Negotiation Strategies for Achieving Win-Win Situation: A Case Study on Disney-Pixar Acquisition
Analyzes Disney's $7.4B acquisition of Pixar in 2006 as a model of preserving an acquired firm's creative culture while capturing financial upside.
Read the case study → - Case study2006
Skype
Examines eBay's 2005 acquisition of internet-telephony startup Skype, questioning the strategic fit between an auction marketplace and a communications platform. Often referenced as a cautionary example of acquiring outside a company's core competency.
Read the case study → - Research paper2006
The Performance of Reverse Leveraged Buyouts
Finds companies that IPO after a leveraged buyout outperform other IPOs and the broader stock market over three- and five-year horizons.
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Thirty Years of Mergers and Acquisitions Research: Recent Advances and Future Opportunities
A retrospective review of three decades of M&A scholarship across finance, strategy, and organizational behavior, arguing the field has been fragmented across disciplines and calling for more integrative, process-oriented research. Useful as a map of how M&A research has evolved.
Read the paper → - Case study2005
eBay Inc. Reiterates 'The Truth About Skype'
Covers eBay's $2.6B purchase of Skype in 2005, the $1.4B write-down in 2007, and the 2009 divestiture after synergies with its marketplace failed to materialize.
Read the case study → - Research paper2005
Market Valuation and Merger Waves
Develops and tests a theory linking merger waves to misvaluation in equity markets, showing that overvalued firms are more likely to use stock to acquire relatively undervalued targets during hot markets. A core paper in the market-timing explanation for merger waves.
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Private Equity Performance: Returns, Persistence, and Capital Flows
Finds average buyout and venture fund returns net of fees roughly match the S&P 500, but performance persists strongly across a partnership's successive funds.
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Valuation Waves and Merger Activity: The Empirical Evidence
Decomposes market-to-book ratios to show merger waves are linked to sector-wide misvaluation, with low long-run-value firms tending to acquire high long-run-value firms.
Read the paper → - Research paper2005
Wealth Destruction on a Massive Scale? A Study of Acquiring-Firm Returns in the Recent Merger Wave
Documents that acquiring-firm shareholders lost a combined $240 billion around acquisition announcements from 1998-2001, driven disproportionately by a small number of large loss deals. It is a key empirical touchstone for the argument that big M&A often destroys acquirer value.
Read the paper → - Research paper2005
What Drives Merger Waves?
Shows that industry merger waves arise from an interaction between economic shocks that require large-scale asset reallocation and sufficient capital-market liquidity to finance the deals. It reframes merger waves as a rational response to changing industry conditions rather than pure market timing.
Read the paper → - Research paper2004
Firm Size and the Gains from Acquisitions
Examines over 12,000 acquisitions from 1980-2001 and finds small acquiring firms earn announcement returns roughly two percentage points higher than large acquirers.
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Meta-Analyses of Post-Acquisition Performance: Indications of Unidentified Moderators
A meta-analysis of decades of acquisition-performance studies finding that, on average, acquiring firms show essentially zero abnormal performance gains, and that commonly cited moderators (relatedness, method of payment, prior experience) fail to explain the variance. Frequently cited as evidence that 'most M&A fails to create value.'
Read the paper → - Research paper2003
Stock Market Driven Acquisitions
Models mergers as driven by relative stock market misvaluations between acquirer and target, explaining payment choice and merger wave timing.
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Termination Fees in Mergers and Acquisitions
Finds target termination fees are associated with higher takeover premiums and are used more often when deal-specific value is at greater risk.
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DaimlerChrysler Post-Merger Integration (A)
Examines the integration challenges following the 1998 'merger of equals' between Daimler-Benz and Chrysler, focusing on how cultural and organizational clashes undermined the deal's promised synergies. A classic case on the operational and cultural risks of cross-border M&A.
Read the case study → - Research paper2002
Does M&A Pay? A Survey of Evidence for the Decision-Maker
Synthesizes over 130 studies on M&A performance and concludes the honest answer is 'it depends' — returns to target shareholders are reliably positive, while acquirer returns are roughly a coin flip depending on deal structure, price paid, and integration quality. Widely used as a practitioner-oriented literature review.
Read the paper → - Case study2002
Hewlett-Packard-Compaq: The Merger Decision
Puts students in HP's boardroom during the contentious, closely fought 2001-2002 decision to merge with Compaq, including the proxy fight led by Walter Hewlett against the deal. A well-known case on evaluating strategic rationale for M&A under public shareholder opposition.
Read the case study → - Case study2002
Valuing the AOL Time Warner Merger
A teaching case built around the 2000 AOL-Time Warner combination, walking students through the valuation assumptions used to justify what became one of the most notorious value-destroying mergers in corporate history. Widely used to teach the dangers of stock-for-stock deals struck at market peaks.
Read the case study → - Case study2002
WorldCom Financial Fraud Case Study: Ethics Violations and Impact
Details WorldCom's 1998 MCI merger and the $11B accounting fraud that followed, capitalizing operating expenses to inflate earnings before its 2002 collapse.
Read the case study → - Research paper2001
Characteristics of Risk and Return in Risk Arbitrage
Analyzes 4,750 mergers from 1963-1998 and finds merger-arbitrage returns resemble those from selling uncovered index put options, with downside risk concentrated in market declines.
Read the paper → - Case study2001
Cisco Systems: New Millennium - New Acquisition Strategy?
Analyzes Cisco's aggressive late-1990s/2000s growth-by-acquisition strategy in networking technology, including how it screened targets and managed rapid post-merger integration during a market downturn. A well-known case on high-volume, technology-sector serial acquisitions.
Read the case study → - Research paper2001
New Evidence and Perspectives on Mergers
Reviews merger activity and shareholder returns through the 1990s wave, documenting that combined target-and-acquirer returns around deal announcements are positive on average, even though acquirer-only returns are frequently negative. It's a widely assigned overview of the M&A evidence base.
Read the paper → - Case study2001
Terra Lycos: Creating a Global and Profitable Integrated Media Company
INSEAD case on Terra Networks' $12.5B purchase of Lycos at the dot-com peak in 2000, a deal that lost over 99% of its value by the time Lycos resold for $95M in 2004.
Read the case study → - Case study2001
The Attempted Merger Between General Electric and Honeywell: A Case Study of Transatlantic Conflict
Analyzes the $41B GE-Honeywell merger cleared by U.S. regulators but blocked by the European Commission in 2001, the only U.S.–U.S. deal killed solely by EU antitrust action.
Read the case study → - Case study2000
Vodafone AirTouch's Bid for Mannesmann
Covers the largest hostile cross-border takeover of its time — Vodafone AirTouch's 1999-2000 pursuit of German conglomerate Mannesmann — examining valuation, financing structure, and the clash between Anglo-American and German corporate-governance norms. A landmark case on hostile cross-border deal-making in Europe.
Read the case study → - Case study1999
Clash of the Cultures: The Case of Newell Rubbermaid
Examines Newell's 1999 $6.3B acquisition of Rubbermaid, dubbed the 'merger from hell,' where cultural and operational mismatches erased over half of shareholder value.
Read the case study → - Case study1999
Strategic Lessons and Theoretical Explanations – The Vodafone Mannesmann Case
Examines Vodafone's $185B hostile takeover of Mannesmann in 1999–2000, the first hostile takeover of a major German company by a foreign firm.
Read the case study → - Case study1999
The Exxon-Mobil Merger: An Archetype
Analyzes the 1998–99 Exxon-Mobil merger, the largest industrial merger to date, and its role in the oil industry's second wave of 1990s consolidation.
Read the case study → - Research paper1999
The Long-Term Performance of Horizontal Acquisitions
Studies horizontal (same-industry) acquisitions in Europe and North America and finds that resource redeployment between acquirer and target — not just acquiring resources one-way — is what drives long-term performance gains. A key strategic-management contribution on how synergies are actually realized.
Read the paper → - Research paper1997
Do Long-Term Shareholders Benefit From Corporate Acquisitions?
Tracks five-year post-acquisition stock returns and finds that acquirers using stock financing significantly underperform, while cash-financed tender offers tend to outperform, highlighting how method of payment predicts long-run shareholder outcomes. A widely cited long-horizon event study in M&A finance.
Read the paper → - Case study1997
The Case of Boeing and McDonnell Douglas Merger: Building and Leading Teams
Traces how Boeing's 1997 acquisition of McDonnell Douglas imported a cost-driven management culture that reshaped Boeing's engineering priorities for decades.
Read the case study → - Research paper1996
The Impact of Industry Shocks on Takeover and Restructuring Activity
Shows 1980s takeover and restructuring activity clustered in industries experiencing the largest economic shocks, supporting an industry-shock theory of merger waves.
Read the paper → - Research paper1996
The Method of Payment in Corporate Acquisitions, Investment Opportunities, and Management Ownership
Finds acquirers with greater growth opportunities are more likely to finance deals with stock, while the payment-ownership relation is nonlinear.
Read the paper → - Research paper1995
An Empirical Analysis of Some Determinants of the Target Shareholder Premium in Takeovers
Examines factors including target size and industry conditions that explain variation in takeover premiums paid to target shareholders.
Read the paper → - Case study1995
Newell Co.: Acquisition Strategy
Explores how consumer-products conglomerate Newell selected, priced, and integrated a long string of 'bolt-on' acquisitions of housewares brands, illustrating a disciplined, repeatable serial-acquirer strategy. A classic teaching case on corporate strategy and M&A as a core competency.
Read the case study → - Case study1994
The Quaker Oats Company
Covers Quaker Oats' 1994 acquisition of Snapple for $1.7B and its resale just 27 months later for $300M after a distribution-strategy mismatch.
Read the case study → - Research paper1993
The Role of Culture Compatibility in Successful Organizational Marriage
An early and influential argument that cultural fit between merging organizations is as important to deal success as financial and strategic fit, proposing a framework for assessing cultural compatibility before combination. It helped launch the substantial M&A culture-integration literature.
Read the paper → - Research paper1992
Does Corporate Performance Improve After Mergers?
Examines the 50 largest U.S. mergers of the 1980s and finds that merged firms show significant improvements in operating cash-flow returns relative to industry peers, driven by gains in asset productivity rather than cost cutting alone. A key study supporting real operating synergies from M&A.
Read the paper → - Research paper1991
The Evolution of Buyout Pricing and Financial Structure
Documents systematic changes in the pricing and financial structure of 124 large management buyouts completed between 1980 and 1989. Over the decade, prices rose relative to current cash flows without lower risk or higher projected cash flows, required bank principal repayments accelerated, private subordinated debt gave way to public debt while strip financing declined, and management invested a smaller share of net worth in post-buyout equity. Based on ex ante data, later buyouts could have been expected to earn lower returns and suffer more frequent distress, consistent with preliminary post-buyout evidence.
Read the paper → - Research paper1991
The Staying Power of Leveraged Buyouts
Documents the organizational status over time of 183 large leveraged buyouts completed between 1979 and 1986. As of August 1990, 63% remained privately owned, 14% were independent public companies and 23% were owned by other public companies, with the median time private equal to 6.7 years. The evidence suggests most LBO organizations are neither short-lived nor permanent, and that asset sales play a role in but are not the primary motive for LBOs.
Read the paper → - Research paper1990
Do Managerial Objectives Drive Bad Acquisitions?
Finds acquirer returns are systematically lower when firms diversify, buy fast-growing targets, or have managers with a record of poor performance.
Read the paper → - Research paper1989
The Effects of Leveraged Buyouts on Productivity and Related Aspects of Firm Behavior
Investigates the economic effects of leveraged buyouts using longitudinal Census Bureau establishment and firm data linked to LBOs; about 1,100 manufacturing plants (5% of the sample) were involved in LBOs during 1981-86. Plants involved in LBOs had significantly higher total factor productivity growth than industry peers, with management buyouts showing particularly strong effects. Labor and capital decline relative to industry after the buyout but more slowly than before, nonproduction labor costs fall sharply, production worker wages rise, and R&D intensity increases at least as much as at other firms.
Read the paper → - Research paper1989
The Effects of Management Buyouts on Operating Performance and Value
Finds operating income and cash flow rise significantly relative to industry peers in the years following management buyouts.
Read the paper → - Research paper1987
Corporate Takeover Bids, Methods of Payment, and Bidding Firms' Stock Returns
Finds bidding-firm stock returns are significantly more negative in stock-financed takeovers than in cash offers, consistent with signaling effects of payment method.
Read the paper → - Research paper1986
Agency Costs of Free Cash Flow, Corporate Finance, and Takeovers
Introduces the influential 'free cash flow' theory of takeovers, arguing that managers with excess cash tend to pursue value-destroying acquisitions rather than pay it out to shareholders, making takeovers a disciplining mechanism. It is a cornerstone of agency-theory explanations for why firms acquire.
Read the paper → - Research paper1985
Golden Parachutes, Executive Decision-Making, and Shareholder Wealth
Finds adoption of golden parachute agreements is associated with a positive stock market reaction, consistent with reduced management resistance to value-increasing takeovers.
Read the paper → - Research paper1983
The Market for Corporate Control: The Scientific Evidence
A foundational survey of early empirical research on tender offers, mergers, and proxy contests, concluding that acquisitions create value for target shareholders but that gains to acquirers are far less certain. It remains one of the most-cited starting points for M&A finance research.
Read the paper → - Case study1901
Morgan Assembles the World's Largest Corporation
Chronicles J.P. Morgan's 1901 assembly of U.S. Steel from Carnegie Steel and rivals into the first billion-dollar corporation, controlling 60% of American steel output.
Read the case study → - Research paper
Access to Patent Information and Technological Acquisitions
Uses staggered openings of patent depository libraries as a natural experiment showing that lower information costs increase firms' technology-driven acquisition activity.
Read the paper → - Research paper
Acquisition Entrepreneurship: One Solution to the Looming Business Succession Crisis
Argues search-fund style acquisition entrepreneurship can connect retiring small-business owners with successor operators.
Read the paper → - Case study
Amy's Buyout: Entrepreneurship Through Acquisition (A)
Three-part HBS case following a corporate manager's decision process to buy and run a small business.
Read the case study → - Case study
Brown Robin Capital: Executing a Search Fund Acquisition
Follows Stanford GSB grads Ryan Robinson and Lucas Braun raising a search fund and acquiring data-services business OnRamp.
Read the case study → - Research paper
Building an Industry Thesis for Entrepreneurship Through Acquisition (ETA)
Examines how ETA searchers build and use industry theses to focus self-funded and traditional search fund acquisitions.
Read the paper → - Case study
Case Study: Business Buyer Acquires Two Businesses w/ SBA, $4.8M funded
Documents a real buyer's SBA 7(a)-financed acquisition of a marketing company and a real estate firm totaling $4.887M with 7.5% equity injection.
Read the case study → - Research paper
Entrepreneurship Through Acquisition in the Digital Age: Exploring Acquirer Identities, Motivations, and Strategies
Profiles current ETA acquirers and examines how digital-native businesses are reshaping acquisition entrepreneurship strategy.
Read the paper → - Research paper
Entrepreneurship through acquisition in the digital age: exploring website ownership patterns and motivations for selling
Studies acquirers and sellers of online/digital businesses to identify ownership patterns and motivations for selling.
Read the paper → - Case study
Entrepreneurship through acquisition: Vanessa Monestel's search fund
HBS case following searcher Vanessa Monestel's process of raising and executing a search fund acquisition.
Read the case study → - Research paper
Firm Size, Targetiveness, and Acquirer Announcement Returns
Documents an inverted-U relation between firm size and the likelihood of becoming an acquisition target, explaining much of the size-related gap in acquirer announcement returns.
Read the paper → - Research paper
How Do Private Equity Investments Perform Compared to Public Equity?
Finds average buyout fund returns exceeded public markets for most vintage years before 2006, while post-2005 vintages performed roughly in line with public equity.
Read the paper → - Research paper
How Informative Are Acquirer Announcement Returns? Evidence from Merger Waves
Finds that acquirer announcement-period returns mainly capture readily observable deal information, while deeper valuation effects are only priced in over subsequent years.
Read the paper → - Case study
Jetsort (Jeff Stevens: United Presort Services and Jetsort)
Tracks search-fund entrepreneur Jeff Stevens acquiring a rival mail-presort company and negotiating financing with existing and new investors.
Read the case study → - Research paper
Leveraged Buyouts: A Survey of the Literature
Surveys the academic literature on public-to-private deals, management buyouts, and leveraged buyouts, summarizing evidence on motives and performance.
Read the paper → - Research paper
Merger Negotiations and the Toehold Puzzle
Examines why bidders rarely purchase a target ownership stake before launching a takeover bid despite the large premiums ultimately paid.
Read the paper → - Research paper
Mergers and Acquisitions in Family Businesses: Current Literature and Future Insights
Systematically reviews 41 journal articles on family-business M&A across propensity, process and performance themes.
Read the paper → - Research paper
Mergers and Acquisitions Valuation: Cash vs Stock Payment
Analyzes how the choice between cash and stock consideration relates to valuation outcomes in M&A transactions across markets.
Read the paper → - Research paper
Returns to Acquirers of Listed and Unlisted Targets
Shows acquirer announcement returns differ systematically depending on whether the target is a publicly listed or privately held company.
Read the paper → - Research paper
Toeholds, Takeover Premium, and the Probability of Being Acquired
Finds a bidder's pre-offer ownership stake (toehold) in the target is associated with lower takeover premiums and higher acquisition probability.
Read the paper → - Case study
Vector Healthcare
Follows searcher Peter Kingston through forming a partnership, launching a search fund, acquiring a health-insurance company and selling it via auction.
Read the case study → - Case study
Yobella
Chronicles searcher Luke Tashie's acquisition of frozen-yogurt chain Yobella and the financial distress that followed.
Read the case study →
Frequently Asked Questions
What kind of research is in the Academics library?
Peer-reviewed academic papers and business-school case studies on private equity, leveraged buyouts, search funds, and M&A more broadly — covering topics like PE fund performance, search fund outcomes, and entrepreneurship through acquisition.
Is the Academics library free to browse?
Yes. Every paper and case study brief is free to browse, with a link out to the original source (journal, SSRN, or publisher) — no paywall on WhoBoughtWho's side.
How are papers and case studies selected?
Each entry is a real, verified publication — not summarized or fabricated — chosen for relevance to private equity, search funds, or business acquisitions, with a brief and a direct link back to the source.