IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/fmg/fmgdps/dp698.html

Borrow Cheap, Buy High? The Determinants of Leverage and Pricing in Buyouts

Author

Listed:
  • Ulf Axelson

  • Tim Jenkinsom

  • Per Strömberg

  • Michael S. Weisbach

Abstract

Private equity sponsors pay special attention to designing capital structure, making buyouts an interesting setting for examining capital structure theories. In a detailed international sample of buyouts, we find that buyout leverage is unrelated to factors that drive public firm leverage, such as industry factors and other cross-sectional characteristics, contrary to what standard capital structure theories suggest. Instead, variation in economy-wide credit conditions is the main driver of leverage and pricing in buyouts, while having little impact on public firms. Higher deal leverage is associated with lower buyout fund returns, suggesting that acquirers overpay when access to credit is easier.

Suggested Citation

  • Ulf Axelson & Tim Jenkinsom & Per Strömberg & Michael S. Weisbach, 2012. "Borrow Cheap, Buy High? The Determinants of Leverage and Pricing in Buyouts," FMG Discussion Papers dp698, Financial Markets Group.
    • Handle: RePEc:fmg:fmgdps:dp698
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.lse.ac.uk/fmg/workingPapers/discussionPapers/fmg_pdfs/dp698.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • G24 - Financial Economics - - Financial Institutions and Services - - - Investment Banking; Venture Capital; Brokerage
    • G32 - Financial Economics - - Corporate Finance and Governance - - - Financing Policy; Financial Risk and Risk Management; Capital and Ownership Structure; Value of Firms; Goodwill

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:fmg:fmgdps:dp698. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: The FMG Administration (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.lse.ac.uk/fmg/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.