Our Research Strategy
At IPC, data, research and education improve understanding of the role of private capital in the global economy. An essential first step for generating quality research is access to reliable data. Thus, our top priority is making research-quality data sources widely available to academic researchers.
Access to data on private investments presents challenges, including confidentiality concerns, the proprietary nature of many datasets, and the diffuse nature of private investments. However, we believe that these challenges are best addressed by a deliberate systematic approach through a combined academic effort. In many cases, data owners welcome the benefits derived from confidential analysis of their data by objective academic researchers.
This paper provides a first look at the holdings of private credit funds using the MSCI Private Capital Universe, which is built from the reports that general partners send to their limited partners.
Private capital fund managers appear to possess significant information about the relative quality of their portfolio firms even within the first three years after the investment.
The rise of private markets has placed a growing volume of opaque debt securities onto the balance sheets of regulated financial institutions. The risk assessment of these assets is increasingly outsourced through private ratings
We study how the organization of human capital shapes the provision of information-sensitive lending in private credit (PC) firms. We document the move of credit-related personnel from banks to PC firms over the past decade, with substantial gains in seniority, non-salary compensation, and retention
We examine secondary market pricing for private equity buyout funds to assess what historical price trends reveal about the current market. Using almost 3,000 pricing observations spanning September 2015 through the end of 2025, we find that secondary market prices average 8% below net asset value (NAV) and move closely with public equity returns, consistent with...
The financial performance of private investments has several features that are not present for publicly traded investments: Valuations are unobserved (latent) until exit. Exit time and failures are endogenous.
The popularity of Independent Sponsor (IS) investments has increased substantially in recent years, yet very little research examines investment characteristics and performance. We survey limited partners who invest in IS companies as well as independent sponsors themselves to better understand these investments.
We provide first evidence on the returns and risk characteristics of private credit indexes calculated by MSCI, Pitchbook, and Preqin. Broad private credit indexes have outperformed liquid credit markets in both absolute and risk-adjusted terms
We study the risk and return properties of private real estate, infrastructure, and natural resources funds using a large dataset on private real assets.
Private equity fund general partners (GPs) strategically adjust their investment strategies in response to early returns. Funds experiencing higher early returns in the fund life cycle subsequently shift away from riskier investments
Why do some fund managers outperform others? I construct a novel dataset to study this question in private equity (PE), tracking the careers and deals of PE professionals who have deployed 97% of capital for U.S. PE firms over the past three decades.
Non-bank lending to small-and medium-sized firms-i.e., private credit-has exploded over the past two decades. To explore the rise in its popularity, we focus on Business Development Companies...