SWEDISH PRIVATE EQUITY - A study on perfomrance of Private Equity owned companies in Sweden

Abstract

This thesis aims to study the possible superior performance of Swedish companies owned by Private Equity firms. This is achieved through constructing a panel dataset consisting of portfolio companies of the ten largest Swedish Private Equity firms and comparing their performance with companies derived from a small cap stock market index. In our results, we find indications supporting an overperformance of the companies owned by a Private Equity firm relative to the public benchmark. However, it is still difficult to derive the true explanatory variables explaining why this occurs and by which magnitude the Private Equity companies overperform.