Kaplan and Stromberg

Leveraged Buyouts and Private Equity

Steven N. Kaplan and Per Strömberg

Steven N. Kaplan is Neubauer Family Professor of Entrepreneurship and Finance, University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, Chicago, Illinois. Per Strömberg is Professor of Finance at the Stockholm School of Economics and Director of the Swedish Institute of Financial Research (SIFR), both in Stockholm, Sweden. Both authors are also Research Associates, National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Their e-mail addresses are and .

This Draft: June 2008 Abstract

We describe and present time series evidence on the leveraged buyout / private equity industry, both firms and transactions. We discuss the existing empirical evidence on the economics of the firms and transactions. We consider similarities and differences between the recent private equity wave and the wave of the 1980s. Finally, we speculate on what the evidence implies for the future of private equity.

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Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1194962

In a leveraged buyout, a company is acquired by a specialized investment firm using a relatively small portion of equity and a relatively large portion of outside debt financing. The leveraged buyout investment firms today refer to themselves (and are generally referred to) as private equity firms.1 In a typical leveraged buyout transaction, the private equity firm buys majority control of an existing or mature firm. This is distinct from venture capital (VC) firms that typically invest in young or emerging companies, and typically do not obtain majority control. In this paper, we focus specifically on private equity firms and the leveraged buyouts in which they invest. Leveraged buyouts first emerged as an important phenomenon in the 1980s. As leveraged buyout activity increased in that decade, Jensen (1989) predicted that the leveraged buyout organizations would eventually become the dominant corporate organizational form. His...