Money chasing deals and chasing money - the impact of supply and demand on buyout performance

This paper analyzes the impact of differences in supply of and demand for private equity financing on the performance of buyouts. Using a unique and proprietary sample of 684 buyout investments in North America and Europe, we show that buyout performance decreases when large volumes of private equity commitments are looking for suit-able acquisition targets and (b) increases when macroeconomic conditions are such that demand for private equity financing is high. These findings remain unchanged if we control for the idiosyncrasies of individual investment periods, transaction size, holding period and industry sector of individual investment and the vintage year, the size or the age of the investing private equity fund. Our results support the view that the market for buyout target companies is not necessarily efficient, but that instead acquisition prices (and thereby transaction performance) depend on the competition by a limited number of private equity fund managers for a limited number of attractive investment opportuni-ties.Private Equity funds; buyouts; performance; investment behavior

Does Unemployment Hurt Less if There Is More of It Around?: A Panel Analysis of Life Satisfaction in Germany and Switzerland

This paper examines the existence of a habituation effect to unemployment: Do the unemployed suffer less from job loss if unemployment is more widespread, if their own unemployment lasts longer and if unemployment is a recurrent experience? The underlying idea is that unemployment hysteresis may operate through a sociological channel: if many people in the community lose their job and remain unemployed over an extended period, the psychological cost of beingunemployed diminishes and the pressure to accept a new job declines. We analyze this question with individual-level data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (1984-2009) and the Swiss Household Panel (2000-2009). We find no evidence for a mitigating effect of high surrounding unemployment on unemployed individuals' subjective well-being: Becoming unemployed hurts as much when regional unemployment is high as when it is low. Likewise, the strongly harmful impact of being unemployed on well-being does not wear off over time, nor do repeated episodes of unemployment make it any better. It thus appears doubtful that an unemployment shock becomes persistent because the unemployed become used to, and hence reasonably content with, being without a job.Subjective well-being, unemployment, hysteresis, happiness, social norm

Scalable approximate FRNN-OWA classification

Fuzzy Rough Nearest Neighbour classification with Ordered Weighted Averaging operators (FRNN-OWA) is an algorithm that classifies unseen instances according to their membership in the fuzzy upper and lower approximations of the decision classes. Previous research has shown that the use of OWA operators increases the robustness of this model. However, calculating membership in an approximation requires a nearest neighbour search. In practice, the query time complexity of exact nearest neighbour search algorithms in more than a handful of dimensions is near-linear, which limits the scalability of FRNN-OWA. Therefore, we propose approximate FRNN-OWA, a modified model that calculates upper and lower approximations of decision classes using the approximate nearest neighbours returned by Hierarchical Navigable Small Worlds (HNSW), a recent approximative nearest neighbour search algorithm with logarithmic query time complexity at constant near-100% accuracy. We demonstrate that approximate FRNN-OWA is sufficiently robust to match the classification accuracy of exact FRNN-OWA while scaling much more efficiently. We test four parameter configurations of HNSW, and evaluate their performance by measuring classification accuracy and construction and query times for samples of various sizes from three large datasets. We find that with two of the parameter configurations, approximate FRNN-OWA achieves near-identical accuracy to exact FRNN-OWA for most sample sizes within query times that are up to several orders of magnitude faster

Modeling the complex dynamics of enzyme-pathway coevolution.

Peer reviewedPostprin

Estimating features of a distribution from binomial data

A statistical problem that arises in several fields is that of estimating the features of an unknown distribution, which may be conditioned on covariates, using a sample of binomial observations on whether draws from this distribution exceed threshold levels set by experimental design. One application is destructive duration analysis, where the process is censored at an observation test time. Another is referendum contingent valuation in resource economics, where one is interested in features of the distribution of values placed by consumers on a public good such as endangered species. Sample consumers are asked whether they would vote for a referendum that would provide the good at a cost speci…ed by experimental design. This paper provides estimators for moments and quantiles of the unknown distribution in this problem.