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Private Equity: The Asset Class, Its Investments & Its Markets

Course B8394-001

Fall 2014

Class Session Times: Mondays 4:00PM-7:15PM

Class Location: TBD

Professor: H. Marshall Sonenshine

Email: msonenshine@sonenshinepartners.com or ms3978@columbia.edu

Telephone: (212) 994-3330

Office hours: Upon request

Course Overview

This course surveys the private equity asset class emphasizing primarily corporate buyouts and secondarily growth capital. Over the past three decades, private equity has evolved into a global industry approximately $3 trillion of capital commitments.  The industry includes hundreds of well-established private equity firms with differentiated strategies many of which have produced meaningful returns for institutional investors and extraordinary returns for the entrepreneurs who started these companies and invested alongside investors. The characteristics of their strategies and underlying investments have spawned an asset class that has become a requisite portfolio allocation for a broad range of institutional investors.  While the financial crisis has inevitably taken its toll on current investments and on the industry, and we will discuss that as well, the industry remains a highly important constituency in financial and corporate markets and one that will continue to evolve as financial markets and macroeconomic change. This course will provide a framework for understanding the industry’s evolution to date, its impact on and implications for corporate and financial dynamics, and the trends that will shape its future role.

We will explore the evolution of the private equity market and its players as well as the characteristics that have contributed to its sustainability. We will delve into its impact on other markets – M&A, financing, equity, investor and labor – and its general implications for issues of business strategy, corporate governance and the management of...