Private Equity Research Consortium (PERC) is an assemblage of academic researchers and industry professionals dedicated to advancing research on private equity and credit. Our core mission is to develop a better understanding of how private capital investments affect both financial results and broader economic outcomes.
PERC, organized through IPC, was established in 2012 by scholars from the business schools at the University of Chicago, Duke University, UNC-Chapel Hill, University of Oxford, and the University of Virginia as well as other institutions who recognized challenges facing empirical research on private equity. PERC supports academic studies by researchers all over the world by facilitating access to data for scholars. For example, PERC has an exclusive arrangement with MSCI to provide access to data for academic research. The MSCI-Burgiss data available for use by PERC researchers contains over 15,000 funds and about 320,000 underlying investment holdings. It is sourced directly from limited partners and contains full performance histories of cash flows at the fund level. The MSCI-Burgiss dataset represents the largest and most in-depth dataset of its kind on venture, buyout, and real estate funds available for academic research.
PERC periodically accepts applications from academic researchers for access to MSCI-Burgiss private equity fund data.
Greg Brown
Research Director, IPC; Weatherspoon Distinguished Professor of Finance, UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School
Keith Crouch
Executive Director, Co-Head Private Capital Product, MSCI
Robert S. Harris
C. Stewart Sheppard Professor of Business Administration, University of Virginia, Darden School; (PERC Advisory Board Chair)
Yael Hochberg
Ralph S. O’Connor Professor in Entrepreneurship & Finance, Head of the Entrepreneurship Initiative, Rice University
Tim Jenkinson
Professor of Finance, Oxford University, Saïd Business School
Steven Kaplan
Neubauer Family Distinguished Service Professor of Entrepreneurship and Finance, University of Chicago, Booth School of Business
David Robinson
Professor of Finance and J. Rex Fuqua Distinguished Professor of International Management, Duke University, Fuqua School of Business
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
Persistent underperformance in private equity is commonly attributed to uninformative performance signals. We show that permissive continuation rules, not poor signal quality, allow low-skill managers to persist.
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...
We study human capital in venture capital (VC) using a new dataset covering over 100,000 professionals affiliated with U.S. VC firms.
This paper examines how industry concentration evolves through changes in corporate ownership, with a focus on private equity.
We study how private equity (PE) buyouts reshape firms' internal organization. Combining data on over 10,000 U.S. PE buyouts with resume histories of more than five million employees
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 document a new pattern in nonbank lending: business development companies (BDCs) extend substantial credit commitments to borrowers, with commitment-to-asset ratios comparable to those of banks.