Permanent capital, permanent struggle? New evidence from listed private equity

Résumé 0

Recent years witnessed a slew of private equity IPOs, commonly dubbed listed private equity(LPE). While the terminology is oxymoronic, we document aspects of the still-private nature of LPE and study the important question of their performance. Many data providers built on LPEto proxy for traditional (unlisted) private equity (TPE). While index providers use selected LPEs, we build a representative dataset of the LPE universe and compare their performance to TPE. We also examine whether belonging to indices and having minimum liquidity requirements is linked to performance. Our results suggest that listing decreases performance by 4.9% to 5.8% on average. Within LPE, performance is highly related to the organizational forms of the listed entities and is not individually related to liquidity, trading in the home country exchange or with being part of a LPE index. However, the combination of the three decreases alpha by 5% and suppresses its significance.