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Alice Handy, an investment professional with 30 years' experience as head of the University of Virginia Investment Management Company, has opened a new asset management firm targeted at midsize endowments and nonprofit institutions in January 2004. Her business, Investure, LLC, offered outsourced investment services to institutions with $150 million to $1 billion in assets and access to top-performing managers at lower cost than a fund of funds (FoF). Smith College, a prestigious liberal arts college with a nearly $1 billion endowment, is interested in increasing its current allocation to private equity. Handy and her partner are preparing to meet with Smith's trustees in an attempt to win Smith College as Investure's first client. The case presents three different approaches to private equity investing: direct investment through a traditional limited partnership, investment through a FoF, or investment through Investure's outsourced model. The class discussion presents an opportunity to evaluate advantages and shortcomings of each approach, introduce key terminology, and discuss the current trends in the private equity market. Students are given the cash inflows and outflows for a representative investment in a venture capital fund of the type Handy hopes to invest in on behalf of Smith College. The main analytical task requires students to evaluate the expected gross and net returns generated by the representative investment under each of the different approaches and fee structures.

This case was written for an early class in courses on entrepreneurial finance, venture capital, or private equity. It can also be used in specialized courses for fund trustees interested in alternative assets.

The purpose of this paper is to review and analyze policies where employee share ownership might be relevant to the inequality debate in the USA.

Description and analysis of policy alternatives designed to increase the prevalence of employee ownership in the USA economy.

Since 1974, Congress has passed many provisions to encourage employee ownership, all with widespread bipartisan support. Additional policies would have an even greater impact. Congress could “level the playing field” for corporate divestitures and sales of companies by private equity firms; create Employee Ownership Investment Corporations, modeled after Small Business Investment Corporations, to provide capital for sales to employees; and create an Employee Equity Loan Program to guarantee loans for employee-ownership transactions. Such measures would have no budgetary impact. It could also create tax incentives to encourage corporate and private-equity sales to employees and establish regulations to ensure that employee-owned companies are eligible for the full benefit of recent opportunity zone legislation. Legislation could also encourage publicly traded companies to offer stock to employees at a discount and require companies that receive various forms of special treatment from the government to establish employee stock-ownership programs.

The academic journal literature has virtually no policy analyses on employee share ownership.

We investigate whether active involvement of private equity firms in their portfolio companies during the holding period of a later-stage private equity investment is related to increased levels in operating performance of these companies. Our analysis of unique survey data on 267 European buyouts and secondary performance data on 29 portfolio companies using partial least squares structural equation modeling indicates that private equity firms, that is, their board representatives, can increase operating performance not only by monitoring the behavior of top managers of portfolio companies, but also by becoming involved in strategic decisions and supporting top managers through the provision of strategic resources. Strategic resources, in particular expertise and networks, provided by private equity firm representatives in the form of financial and strategic involvement are associated with increases in the financial performance and competitive prospects of portfolio companies. Operational involvement, however, is not related to changes in operating performance. In addition to empirical insights into the different types of involvement and their effects, this chapter contributes to the buyout literature by providing support for the suggested broadening of the theoretical discussion beyond the dominant perspective of agency theory through developing and testing a complementary resource-based view of involvement. This allows taking into account not only the monitoring, but also the more entrepreneurial supporting element of involvement by private equity firms.

The purpose of the study is to explore the board of directors in leveraged buyouts (LBOs) as a distinct source of value creation and to conceptually investigate the going‐private transaction via LBO as a response to deficient governance structures as well as the post‐buyout board restructuring.

The paper provides a review of the literature on LBOs boards, and relies on agency theory and the resource dependence perspective to develop testable propositions. The work suggests that the board as a particular source of efficiency gains in LBOs warrants further empirical research.

The paper gives strong credence to the argument that boards represent a unique source of value creation in LBOs. Previous agency‐theoretic work is complemented by focusing on the monitoring function of the board, but resource dependence theory introduced to suggest the importance of a strategic service and support function. The work is conceptual in nature and thus requires subsequent empirical testing to verify assertions set forth in this study.

The paper shows that incentives of managerial equity participation and the discipline of debt are gradually losing their distinctiveness in today's buyout industry. To compete in an increasingly crowded environment, LBO specialists need to identify new sources of value to generate attractive returns for their investors.

The paper extends the existing LBO literature by introducing resource dependent as a complementary framework. Given that the traditional LBO literature examines the discipline of debt and managerial ownership that explain their efficiencies, the role of LBO boards as a distinct value creation mechanism in buyouts is introduced.

The purpose of this article is to explore how the strategic change following a corporate takeover impacted the nature and extent of use of the firm's management control systems (MCS), in particular its performance measurement system (PMS).

This paper uses Michael Porter's theory of competitive advantage and Robert Simons' levers of control framework to illustrate and interpret changes in the PMS within an Australian multinational subsidiary following its takeover by an overseas corporation. To provide empirical evidence on this issue, face‐to‐face interviews and archival data are used.

The findings reveal that the takeover resulted in changes in the firm's competitive forces (threat of potential entrants, bargaining power of buyers, threat of substitute products or services, bargaining power of suppliers, and rivalry among existing firms), and therefore the firm altered its strategy to change the rules of competition in its favor. Corresponding to the strategic change, the PMS was affected, with specific implications on Simons' four levers of control: interactive, diagnostic, beliefs, and boundary systems.

The findings suggest that a corporate takeover is an important phase for any organization, as it involves a change in the competitive environment and strategy, and needs to be facilitated by a change in the MCS to create and sustain superior performance.

This case study demonstrates how interactive and beliefs systems work together with diagnostic and boundary systems in the context of change in an organization. Past research devoted to strategic change and MCS has not documented this phenomenon.

The tax advantage of debt is considered an important motivation for highly leveraged transactions. The German government limited the tax deductibility of interest expenses to 30.0 percent of earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (the interest barrier rule) in 2008 to reduce the tax incentives for debt financing. This study aims to evaluate the impact of the introduction of the interest barrier rule.

The paper analyzes the changes in the value of the tax shield for German leveraged buyouts as a result of the promulgation of an interest barrier rule. Tax shields are computed to quantify the wealth transfer from taxpayers to corporations.

Prior to the 2008 tax reform, tax shields contributed 8.4 percent to the transaction price, thereby raising the equity value by 33.0 percent on average. With the introduction of the interest barrier rule, the value of tax shields is reduced by 35.1 percent. Affecting more than 75 percent of buyouts, the rule significantly lessens the tax incentive for high levels of debt. The reduction of the corporate tax rate from 31.7 percent to 26.3 percent further lowers the value creation potential. The limited interest deductibility may therefore reduce the number of leveraged buyouts and hence economic growth, unless other non‐debt forms of financing can fulfill the need for capital.

As the first continental European study, this research concentrates on the impact of the German interest barrier rule on value creation in highly leveraged transactions. Conclusions can be drawn in a broader European context.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the informational asymmetry (informational advantage of managers) in leveraged buyout (LBO) transactions.

Unlike previous studies of informational asymmetry in LBOs, this research uses a set of reverse‐LBO and re‐LBO firms. The paper proposes and empirically tests three hypotheses that draw on the informational advantage of managers in LBOs. Specifically, the value gain (VG) realized by the reverse‐LBO firms is compared with that realized by a control sample of firms; the wealth distribution between managers and pre‐buyout shareholders is studied; and, finally, the performance of re‐LBO firms relative to reverse‐LBO firms is evaluated.

The results do not support the view that managers use buyouts to exploit their informational advantage. Specifically; the performance of LBO firms under the private ownership is comparable to those of matching public firms; the management team's return in a LBO deal is not significantly more than pre‐buyout shareholders’ return; and repeating reverse‐LBO firms (re‐LBOs) do not necessarily perform better than the non‐repeating reverse‐LBO firms.

While reverse‐LBOs have been investigated to some extent in the prior literature, studies on re‐LBOs are quite scant – although these transactions offer a new and interesting avenue to examine the motivations behind LBOs in general. The use of the entire LBO − reverse‐LBO − re‐LBO cycle in testing the informational advantage of managers is a novelty. It is hoped that re‐LBOs will attract the amount of attention they deserve as these firms may offer interesting means to reinvestigate commonly debated theories of corporate finance.

This paper presents evidence that the valuation consequences of targeted share repurchase announcements are positively related to the size of the firms' pre‐repur‐chase free cash flows and to the firms' pre‐repurchase build‐up of liquid assets. The paper further reports that the level of liquid assets declines permanently following the share repurchases. The results suggest that a share repurchase is a viable means to cut down surplus cash and that such decision can increase shareholder wealth by reducing agency costs of free cash flows.

Reports on an attempt to launch an unprecedented management buyout, which was seen to have important repercussions for the whole of the £12 billion British buyout industry, and to represent a “test case” regarding the viability and suitability of American‐style leverage deals in Britain. Describes the problems that arose as Magnet plc′s debt increased and its ability to service its interest obligations was undermined.

Following a discussion of the theory of entrepreneurship, this article explains why small firm leveraged buyouts are likely to produce more innovative, efficient, and profitable organizations than those which existed prior to the change in ownership. The article concludes that, unlike the recent hostile acquisitions of publicly traded corporations,small firm leveraged buyouts add value to the U.S. economy and should be recognized as healthy entrepreneurial activity.