Davis, Haltiwanger, Handley, and Lerner are affiliates of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). Haltiwanger and Handley were also part-time Schedule A employees and Javier Miranda was an employee at the U.S. Census Bureau during the preparation of this paper. The authors thank Edie Hotchkiss (discussant), Ron Jarmin, Steve Kaplan, Ann Leamon, Manju Puri, Antoinette Schoar (discussant), and Kirk White for helpful comments, as well as seminar participants at the 2019 American Economic Association annual meeting, Carnegie Mellon University, Georgia Tech, Harvard Law School, the Hoover Institution, Michigan Ross, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the NBER Productivity Lunch Group, and the 2020 Western Finance Association meetings. They thank Christine Rivera, Kathleen Ryan, and James Zeitler of Harvard Business School’s Baker Library for their assistance, as well as Andrea Barreto, Franko Jira, Cameron Khansarinia, Ayomide Opeyemi, Steven Moon, and Yuan Sun. Special thanks to Francisca Rebelo and Tyler Pike for their help with revisions. Per Stromberg generously gave permission to use older transaction data collected as part of a World Economic Forum project. The authors thank the Harvard Business School’s Division of Research, the Private Capital Research Institute, the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, and especially the Smith Richardson Foundation for generous research support. Opinions and conclusions expressed herein are the authors’ and do not necessarily 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 (DRB-B0109-CDAR-2018718, DRB-B0110-CDAR-2018-0718, DRB-B0020-CED-20181128, DRB-B0018-CED-20181126, CBDRB-FY19-CMS-8034, CBDRB-FY21-CED006-0017, CBDRB-FY24-CED006-0006, and CBDRB-FY24-CED006-0011). Lerner has received compensation for advising limited partners in private capital funds, private capital groups, and governments designing policies relevant to private capital. Davis has served as an expert witness in a legal dispute between private equity firms. All errors and omissions are the authors’.
