Private Equity Portfolio Company Fees
View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Oxford University, Saïd Business School: Eureka Private Equity Portfolio Company Fees Ludovic Phalippou*, Christian Rauch*, and Marc Umber ** April 5, 2016 Abstract In private equity, General Partners (GPs) may receive fee payments from companies whose board they control. This paper describes the related contracts and shows that these fee payments sum up to $20 billion evenly distributed over the last twenty years, representing over 6% of the equity invested by GPs on behalf of their investors. Fees do not vary according to business cycles, company characteristics, or GP performance. Fees vary significantly across GPs and are persistent within GPs. GPs charging the least raised more capital post financial crisis. GPs that went public distinctively increased their fees prior to that event. We discuss how results can be explained by optimal contracting versus tunneling theories. JEL classification: G20, G23, G24, G32, G34 Keywords: Private Equity, Monitoring Fees, Transaction Fees, Compensation, Corporate Governance, Leveraged Buy-Out * University of Oxford, Said Business School ** High-Tech Gründerfonds Corresponding author: ludovic.phalippou(at)sbs.ox.ac.uk An earlier version of the paper was entitled ‘Deal-Level Fees and LBO Performance.’ We are thankful to Jerry Cao, Josh Lerner, Edith Hotchkiss, David Smith, and Per Stromberg for sharing some of their data with us. For valuable comments and suggestions we would like to thank Jason Berkowitz, Francois Degeorge, Michael Grote, Thomas Hellmann, Tim Jenkinson, Michael Koetter, Chen Liu, Andrey Malenko (AFA discussant), Jens Martin, Daniel Metzger, Peter Morris, Alan Morrison, Tarun Ramadorai, David Robinson, Zacharias Sautner, Günter Strobl, Peter Tufano, Ayako Yasuda (Caltech conference discussant) as well as participants at several conferences and seminars.
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