Do private equity owners increase risk of financial distress and bankruptcy?

There is some controversy on the key sources of success in the private equity model and on how this business model affects the portfolio companies. We investigate financial distress risks of European companies around the buyout event in the period between 2000 and 2008. In addition, we analyze whether buyout companies go bankrupt more often than comparable non-buyout companies. Our paper suggests that private equity investors select companies which are less financially distressed than comparable companies and that the distress risk increases after the buyout. Despite this increase, private equity-backed companies do not suffer from higher bankruptcy rates than non-buyout companies. In fact, when companies are backed by experienced private equity funds, their bankruptcy rates are even lower. Experienced investors seem to be better able to manage distress risks than their inexperienced counterparts. --private equity,buyout,financial distress,bankruptcy

The nature of the gaze : a conceptual discussion of societal privilege from an indigenous perspective : a thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at Massey University, SHORE & Whāriki Research Centre, College of Health, Aotearoa New Zealand

This thesis explores how Kaupapa Māori paradigms can make important contributions to research topics that may not be of direct or immediate relevance to Māori communities. Insights gained from a Kaupapa Māori investigation of white privilege in Aotearoa New Zealand are discussed. I argue that cultural hegemony is maintained through structured forgetting, silence, and suppression of dissent that has dire consequences for dominant cultural groups as well as marginal. Structural racism and privilege are amenable to analyses utilising similar frameworks albeit from opposite sides that can provide valuable insights to understanding inequity more broadly. I also examine ways in which Kaupapa Māori analyses of white privilege can illuminate pathways of redress that will benefit all New Zealanders and provide more embracing perspectives of nationhood

The role of gender in students’ ratings of teaching quality in computer science and environmental engineering

Students’ ratings of teaching quality on course units in computer science and environmental engineering at a large Swedish university were obtained using the Course Experience Questionnaire; 8,888 sets of ratings were obtained from men and 4,280 sets were obtained from women over ten academic years. There were differences in the ratings given by students taking the two programs; in particular, teachers tended to receive higher ratings in subjects that were less typical for their gender than in subjects that were more typical for their gender. There were differences in the ratings given to male and female teachers, differences in the ratings given by male and female students, and interactions between these two effects. There was no systematic trend for students to give different ratings to teachers of the same gender as themselves compared with teachers of the other gender. Nevertheless, without exception even the statistically significant effects were small in magnitude and unlikely to be of theoretical or practical importance. It is concluded that the causes of differences in the career progression of male and female teachers in engineering education need to be sought elsewhere.   

Consuming identities: alcohol marketing and the commodification of youth experience

Marketing has successfully used the postmodern turn in conceptualisations of the human subject and incorporated contemporary theorising of identities and self into its understanding of the key drivers of consumption. Such developments clearly converge in alcohol marketing practices that target young people where commercialized youth identities available for consumption and engagement are a significant element. This paper reports data from young people that reflect the uptake of such identities and considers the challenges that these developments represent for public health and the wellbeing of young people

Creating intoxigenic environments: Marketing alcohol to young people in Aotearoa New Zealand

Alcohol consumption among young people in New Zealand is on the rise. Given the broad array of acute and chronic harms that arise from this trend, it is a major cause for alarm and it is imperative that we improve our knowledge of key drivers of youth drinking. Changes wrought by the neoliberal political climate of deregulation that characterised the last two decades in many countries including Aotearoa New Zealand have transformed the availability of alcohol to young people. Commercial development of youth alcohol markets has seen the emergence of new environments, cultures and practices around drinking and intoxication but the ways in which these changes are interpreted and taken up is not well understood. This paper reports findings from a qualitative research project investigating the meaning-making practices of young people in New Zealand in response to alcohol marketing. Research data included group interviews with a range of Maori and Pakeha young people at three time periods. Thematic analyses of the youth data on usages of marketing materials indicate naturalisation of tropes of alcohol intoxication. We show how marketing is used and enjoyed in youth discourses creating and maintaining what we refer to as intoxigenic social environments. The implications are considered in light of the growing exposure of young people to alcohol marketing in a discussion of strategies to manage and mitigate its impacts on behaviour and consumption

Embeddings through discrete sets of balls

We investigate whether a Stein manifold M which allows proper holomorphic embedding into ℂ n can be embedded in such a way that the image contains a given discrete set of points and in addition follow arbitrarily close to prescribed tangent directions in a neighbourhood of the discrete set. The infinitesimal version was proven by Forstnerič to be always possible. We give a general positive answer if the dimension of M is smaller than n/2 and construct counterexamples for all other dimensional relations. The obstruction we use in these examples is a certain hyperbolicity conditio

Do private equity owners increase risk of financial distress and bankruptcy?

There is some controversy on the key sources of success in the private equity model and on how this business model affects the portfolio companies. We investigate financial tress risks of European companies around the buyout event in the period between 2000 and 2008. In addition, we analyze whether buyout companies go bankrupt more often than comparable non-buyout companies. Our paper suggests that private equity investors select companies which are less financially distressed than comparable companies and that the distress risk increases after the buyout. Despite this increase, private equity-backed companies do not suffer from higher bankruptcy rates than non-buyout companies. In fact, when companies are backed by experienced private equity funds, their bankruptcy rates are even lower. Experienced investors seem to be better able to manage distress risks than their inexperienced counterparts

Sources of value creation through private equity-backed mergers and acquisitions : the case of buy-and-build strategies

This article documents a new value creation function of private equity investors who carry out buy-and-build strategies. Buy-and-build strategies constitute an initial acquisition of a firm, serving as a “platform”, by a private equity investor and follow-on private equity-backed acquisitions (“add-ons”). The investor merges the platform and add-ons into a single entity. Additionally to the selection of well performing firms by the investors prior to the transaction, we identify value-enhancing potentials which private equity investors explore through buy-and-builds. The investors bring together platforms with lower capacity utilization and lower returns, and add-ons with higher utilization and higher returns in order to allocate resources and capacity more efficiently and to improve firms’ performance. However, the buy-and-build strategies only have a positive impact on the profitability of firms with increasing industry adjusted utilization. Consequently the more efficient deployment of assets for the generation of sales drives the improved performance after buy-and-builds

Modified Paouris inequality

The Paouris inequality gives the large deviation estimate for Euclidean norms of log-concave vectors. We present a modified version of it and show how the new inequality may be applied to derive tail estimates of l_r-norms and suprema of norms of coordinate projections of isotropic log-concave vectors.Comment: 14 page