Capital Structure & Firm Outcomes: Evidence from Dividend Recapitalizations in Private Equity

We are grateful to Cangyuan Li, Siena Matsumoto, and Dean Parker for excellent and dedicated research assistance. We thank participants at the NBER Corporate Finance conference, UT Austin, the Columbia Private Equity Conference, University of Maryland, Oxford, UNC PERC, the AFA, the Virtual Corporate Finance Seminar, the IPC Research Workshop, and the Fixed Income and Financial Institutions Conference, as well as Emek Basker, Shai Bernstein, David J. Brown, Greg Brown, Vladimir Mukharlyamov, Ryan Gilland, Umit Gurun, Steven Kaplan, Holger Mueller, Shawn Munday, Michael Schwert, David Sraer, and Vikrant Vig for helpful comments. Funding for this project comes from the Omidyar Network, where we thank Chris Jurgens for support and insight. We thank MSCI, the Private Equity Research Consortium, and the Institute of Private Capital for assistance with data. Any opinions and conclusions expressed herein are those of the authors and do not represent the views of the U.S. Census Bureau. The Census Bureau has ensured appropriate access and use of confidential data and has reviewed these results for disclosure avoidance protection (Project 7514232: CBDRB-FY24-CED006-0009, CBDRB-FY24-CED006-0018). Howell was a part-time employee of the U.S. Census Bureau at the time of the writing of this paper. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

• January 30, 2025
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