Private Equity: A PhD Course

Korteweg & Westerfield (2022)

• “our survey highlights how much remains to be explored. We include 27 open research questions and opportunities, which we hope will help guide future research towards a more complete model of asset allocation with private equity.”

Korteweg (2019)

• “A key open question involves the set of risk factors in PE. Are PE returns spanned by publicly traded assets, or is there a component of returns that cannot be captured otherwise?”
• “the latter, is that component a risk premium unique to PE, or is it pure alpha?”
• “How much cross-sectional and time-series variation (both in calendar time and over the life of a fund or portfolio company) is there in factor loadings and, ultimately, in risk-adjusted returns?”
• “Can we reconcile prefee and postfee returns, how does the fee structure affect risk taking, and what does that imply for GP compensation?”
• “what is the degree of persistence in GP and LP risk-adjusted returns (and why do LP returns persist in the first place)? Do managers have styles?”
• “How do agency problems or measurement issues from contractual arrangements (between GPs and LPs, and between GPs and portfolio companies) affect returns? And how does PE fit into a broader portfolio of assets?”

Gredil, Griffiths & Stucke (2023)

• “the performance metrics examined herein account only for the holding period abnormal returns and disregard the implications for the investor’s portfolio beyond PE from when the fund managers choose to make contributions and distributions (see, e. g., Gredil, 2022, Jenkinson et al., 2022).”
• “Neither do these methods fully account for the diversification benefits and costs of PE exposures for all investors (Gourier et al., 2022; Korteweg and Westerfield, 2022).”
• “The questions of predictability of future performance by manager and the persistence of skill across managers (see, e.g., Korteweg and Sorensen, 2017, Harris et al., 2020) are also outside the scope of this article.”
• “we note that DA might not be best suited to assess the value-added by the managers during the funds ' life (see Turetsky et al., 2021 for alternatives).”

Brown, Lundblad & Volckmann (2025)

• “Future research should focus on refining benchmarks to capture evolving market dynamics and fund heterogeneity, enabling even greater alignment between analytical rigor and practical application.”

Gupta & Van Nieuwerburgh (2021)

• “Exploring this conjecture more thoroughly represents interesting ground for future research.”
• “Exploring the characteristics of outperforming funds are also merits further inquiry.”
• “Individual private firms, real estate assets, or infrastructure investment projects are applications left for future work.”

Robinson & Sensoy (2016)

• “Ultimately, our analysis raises questions about liquidity that go beyond the scope of this paper.”
• “The general equilibrium properties of the liquidity redistribution that occurs from limited partners to the corporate sector through the private equity channel is an important topic for future research.”

Harris, Jenkinson, Kaplan & Stucke (2023)

• “Of course, this raises questions about investor access to top-performing funds, as VC GPs have tended to restrict the amount of capital they raise, and have increasingly relied on their existing LPs and, indeed, have increased the proportion of capital the GP commit themselves.”
• “This is a promising area for future research, including related issues such as GP succession and the spawning of new GPs as individuals establish a track record.”
• “Exploring the reasons for these divergent trends in persistence between buyout and VC is, we think, a fruitful subject for future [...] research.”
• “It is possible that, as the buyout sector has grown and matured, the buyout business has changed, with operating engineering becoming increasingly important (see Kaplan and Str ¨ omberg (2009)). Some general partners adjusted while others did not. Alternatively, it is possible that general partners learned from each other and that there are relatively few constraints on human capital in buyout and that has led to the lack of persistence in buyout.”

Gompers, Kaplan & Mukharlyamov (2016)

• “It could indicate that IRR and MOIC techniques are sufficiently robust or effective that DCF techniques are not necessary. Alternatively, it could indicate some practical deficiency with DCF techniques, especially in the private equity setting in which fund structures limit investment horizons and considerable asymmetric information exists between general and limited partners.”
• “As the industry becomes more competitive, it will be interesting to see if target hurdle rates come down.”

Sørensen & Yasuda (2023)

• “Why do private equity-backed companies tend to exploit regulatory arbitrage and tax avoidance more aggressively than non-private equity-backed peers?”
• “Do such connections also enable them to pursue either regulatory capture or tax avoidance more successfully or at lower cost?”
• “What policy interventions, if any, can mitigate the misalignment of incentives between private equity and public interests?”
• “What is the aggregate impact of private equity's greater presence in the tech industry on innovation? Does it depend on the composition of publicto-private vs. private-to-private deals? What else matters?”
• “How should impact funds govern and provide incentives for impact generation at the portfolio companies? If implicit rather than explicit contracting is optimal, what is the underlying mechanism?”

Bernstein, Lerner, Sørensen & Strömberg (2017)

• “First, it would be interesting to look at finer data on certain critical aspects of industry performance, such as the rates of layoffs, plant closings and openings, and product and process innovations.”
• “Second, it is important to understand the mechanisms by which the presence of PE-backed firms affects their peers.”
• “much more remains to be explored.”
• “The full impact of the recent financial crisis is an important issue to explore in the future.”

Gupta, Howell, Yannelis & Gupta (2024)

• “Although our results imply PE ownership reduces productivity of nursing homes, it may have more positive effects in other sectors of healthcare with better functioning markets.”
• “Further work is needed to determine how government programs can be redesigned to align the interests of PE-owned firms with those of taxpayers and consumers.”

Strömberg & Thomann (2026)

• “while PE tends to create value in competitive and transparent markets and extract it in opaque or regulated ones, we lack a systematic understanding of which specific features of market structure and regulation drive this heterogeneity - and how policy could shift the balance toward value creation.”
• “LP preferences particularly on ESG - are increasingly shaping PE allocation and engagement, but whether this represents a durable shift in the PE model or a cyclical phenomenon remains unclear.”
• “In general, most evidence on PE's real effects comes from specific time periods, geographies, and sectors. We predict that new insights will emerge and old results will be overturned as more and better data becomes available.”

Ewens & Farre-Mensa (2022)

• “But, as we have noted throughout the text, more research is needed to establish strong causal relationships between these shifts and the new equilibrium outcomes.”

Ewens & Farre-Mensa (2020)

• “How this new equilibrium is affecting the incentives and returns of startup investors remains an open question.”
• “We leave the investigation of these implications for future research.”

Chernenko, Erel & Prilmeier (2022)

• “further theoretical work modeling credit market equilibrium with different types of borrowers and lenders would be a fruitful avenue for future theoretical research”
• “how these mostly unprofitable firms will be able to find liquidity over the short term and how much nonbank financial institutions will help these firms survive is an open question for future empirical research”

Block, Jang, Kaplan & Schulze (2024)

• “It is still an open question as to why the private debt markets have grown so much in recent years, post-global financial crisis, and why private debt investors believe that growth will continue.”
• “It also is a puzzle why private debt funds have been able to operate successfully without the high leverage from short-term debt and deposits emphasized by banking theories of optimal lending and delegated monitoring (e.g. Diamond, 1984; Diamond and Rajan, 2001).”

Doidge, Karolyi & Stulz (2017)

• “The increase in the cost of being listed or the decrease in the benefit of being listed that is required in our simple model to explain the evidence we document could result from increased regulatory hurdles to being public.”
• “However, since regulatory changes mostly occur more than four years after the listing peak, these changes can be at most a partial explanation.”
• “Alternatively, it could be that the decrease in the net benefit of being listed is mostly related to developments in financial markets that make it easier for firms to thrive without being listed.”
• “But, if this is the explanation for our results, the way financial economists think about the functioning and role of exchanges in these capital markets has to change to reflect the new reality that an exchange listing may not be as important as it once was.”

Stulz (2020)

• “This does not mean that there are no risks to the growth of private equity and the decrease in public equity. Price discovery is much poorer in private markets, so that bubbles can develop and there is a high potential for misvaluations.”

Stafford (2022)

• “there is little direct evidence that the activities that require PE ownership are a reliable source of value creation for limited partners.”

Abuzov, Gornall, Shive, Strebulaev & Weisbach (2025)

• “Our evidence on performance is still preliminary, since the majority of CFs have not yet exited.”
• “Yet, not much work has studied why funds are set up the way they are, what frictions lead to the institutional designs we observe, and how other frictions can change the contracting mechanisms.”

Albertus & Denes (2024)

• “A future avenue of research is studying the potential disruptions to financial markets and the economy stemming from fund debt.”

Ewens & Faber (2026)

• “The results inform rather than resolve the policy debate.”

Degeorge, Martin & Phalippou (2016)

• “begging the question of why PE funds are structured as finite-life entities.”
• “It is tempting to speculate on whether changes to standard PE contractual arrangements-for example, contractual caps on the percentage of a fund that a general partner can invest in late SBOs- might improve limited partners' welfare.”
• “A detailed discussion of whether such caps would result in a superior contract overall is beyond the scope of this paper.”