Industry-Level Effects of Private Equity Investment in Europe

This paper examines the relationship between private equity investment and industry-level performance in Europe over 2008-2023. We combine Invest Europe and Eurostat data to construct harmonized country-sector-year panels covering 16 countries overall and 10 sectors, with outcome-specific estimation samples. PE intensity is measured relative to sectoral production value and enters the models with a one-year lag. Baseline fixed-effects models are complemented by additional fixed-effects structures, timing tests and robustness checks. Results indicate that higher lagged PE intensity is consistently associated with stronger subsequent nominal growth in output and value added. Personnel-cost growth is also generally positively associated with PE intensity. By contrast, the employment association is weaker: it loses statistical significance under several robustness checks and does not display the temporal ordering observed for the monetary outcomes. The paper updates the limited European industry-level evidence using a novel harmonized dataset and a period covering substantially different economic conditions, offering new insight into the extent to which PE investment intensity is associated with broader sector-level outcomes.