After The Mega-Buyout Era: Do Public-to-Private Transactions Still Outperform?
By Bryn Wilson Abstract This thesis contributes to existing knowledge of the private equity asset class by examining whether public-to-private leveraged buyouts outperform public peers before and after the mega-buyout era (2005 – 2007). This paper considers the impact of four groups of value drivers on both market- and peer-adjusted returns. These value drivers include […]
Comparing the Performance of Active and Passive Mutual Funds in Developing and Developed Countries
By Nalini Gupta This paper seeks to test the hypothesis that developing countries or informationally inefficient countries should see higher returns for active mutual funds on average than passive funds and the trend should be reversed in developed nations or informationally efficient economies. This analysis is done using a cross section of eight countries, four […]
Determining the Drivers of Acquisition Premiums in Leveraged Buyouts
By Peter Noonan This thesis analyzes factors that determine acquisition premiums paid by private equity firms in public to private leveraged buyouts. Building off of established literature that models the acquisition premiums paid in corporate mergers and acquisitions (M&A), this paper considers factors that influence a private equity firm’s willingness to pay (referred to […]
The Impact of Post-IPO Private Equity Ownership on Long-Term Company Performance
By Maria Suhail and Cipriano Echavarría This thesis contributes to existing knowledge of private equity (PE) by analyzing the impact of PE ownership post-IPO upon the long-term performance of companies. It considers whether companies perform better when PE funds maintain their ownership stakes post-IPO and whether this performance is also impacted by the degree of […]
An Analysis of Passive and Active Bond Mutual Fund Performance
By Michael J. Kiffel and Surya Prabhakar The literature on the performance differential between passively and actively managed equity mutual funds is thorough: passively managed funds generally outperform their active counterparts except in the rare presence of highly-skilled managers. However, there exists limited academic research regarding fixed income mutual funds. This study utilizes the Fama-French […]
Vanguard’s Index Funds vs. Vanguard’s Managed Funds: a Nine Style Box and Fama-French Multi-Variable Regression Approach
By Susheel Nalla Many investors struggle to determine whether they want to invest in managed funds or indexed funds when they build portfolio. Vanguard, founded by John Bogle, a strong advocate for indexed investing has seen his company grow to over $3.9 trillion in funds. In the last three years $1 trillion of new money […]
Evaluating Stock and Bond Portfolio Allocations using CAPER and Tobin’s Q
By Jayanth Ganesan I test whether an investor can increase the returns on their portfolio over the long-term by timing the market using measures of market value, such as the Tobin’s q ratio and the Cyclically Adjusted Price Earnings (CAPE or Shiller-CAPE). To test this proposition, I examine contrarian investor strategies proposed by Smithers and Wright […]
Dealing with Data: An Empirical Analysis of Bayesian Black-Litterman Model Extensions
By Daniel Roeder Portfolio Optimization is a common financial econometric application that draws on various types of statistical methods. The goal of portfolio optimization is to determine the ideal allocation of assets to a given set of possible investments. Many optimization models use classical statistical methods, which do not fully account for estimation risk in […]
Variance Risk Premium Dynamics: The Impact of Asset Price Jumps on Variance Risk Premia
By Jackson Pfeiffer This paper utilizes the high-frequency stock price data and the corresponding daily option price data of several highly capitalized corporations in order to investigate the impact that asset price jumps of individual equities have on the equities’ respective variance risk premia. The findings of this paper describe many characteristics of the variance […]
