Fueling the buyout machine: fundraising in private equity

This paper analyzes the impact of performance, investment-firm-related, and macroeconomic variables on fundraising activities in private equity (PE). We use a novel, backward-looking approach to link current to preceding funds, which allows for including several parallel predecessor funds in our analysis. We employ logit and tobit models to a global sample of 1463 fundraising events observed between 2000 and 2010 in order to estimate the probability of raising and the volume of follow-on funds. Our results show that the average buyout duration of past transactions has a negative impact, whereas exits via an initial public offering (IPO) and deals without industry-style drift positively affect fundraising activities. Larger, industry-diversified, and independent PE firms exhibit a higher likelihood of fundraising and collect larger amounts.