Do Private Equity Funds Manipulate Reported Returns?

Gregory Brown (gregwbrown@unc.edu), Oleg Gredil (ogredil@tulane.edu) and Steven Kaplan (skaplan@uchicago.edu)

Working Papers from eSocialSciences

Abstract: Private equity funds hold assets that are hard to value. Managers may have an incentive to distort reported valuations if these are used by investors to decide on commitments to subsequent funds managed by the same firm. Using a large dataset of buyout and venture funds, this paper tests for the presence of reported return manipulation. It finds evidence that some under-performing managers boost reported returns during times when fundraising takes place. However, those managers are unlikely to raise a next fund, suggesting that investors see through much of the manipulation. In contrast, it also finds that top-performing funds likely understate their valuations. [Working Paper 22493]

Keywords: Private equity funds; reported valuations; reported return manipulation; under-performing managers (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016-08
Note: Institutional Papers
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.esocialsciences.org/Articles/show_Artic ... onalPapers&aid=11205
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 503 Service Unavailable

Related works:
Journal Article: Do private equity funds manipulate reported returns? (2019)
Working Paper: Do Private Equity Funds Manipulate Reported Returns? (2016)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ess:wpaper:id:11205

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from eSocialSciences
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Padma Prakash (padmaprakash@esocialsciences.com).