The Private Equity and Academic Research Link Dump

It's been a while since I did a proper link dump, so it's time to clean out the buffer. I teach CFA again tonight, so I have to leave shortly and prepare. But in the meanwhile, here are some links for your reading pleasure. As usual, they're heavy on Private Equity and Academic research:

Hedge Fund and Private Equity
Mark Hulbert discusses the effectiveness of hedge fund activism in the New York Times (online subscription required).

In a related piece, Equity Private at Going Private is blogging on the relations between Private Equity and Shareholder Activists. The Cliff Notes version (but definitely read the whole thing) is that the two groups have a lot of overlap, but also provide different mechanisms for resolving agency problems.

Texas Pacific Group's founding partner David Bonderman made some opening comments at today’s Super Return 2007 private equity conference in Frankfurt

Academic Research
Green, Jegadeesh, and Tang (three finance profs at Emory University) examine the performance of men vs. women analysts in Gender and Job Performance: Evidence from Wall Street. Dang - another piece I wish I'd written.

Fama and French have just written another interesting piece on the size and market-to-book effects titled "Migration. They study ..."how migration of firms across size and value portfolios contributes to the size and value premiums in average stock returns. The size premium is almost entirely due to the small stocks that earn extreme positive returns and as a result become big stocks. The value premium has three sources: (i) value stocks that improve in type either because they are acquired by other firms or because they earn high returns and so migrate to a neutral or growth portfolio; (ii) growth stocks that earn low returns and as a result move to a neutral or value portfolio; and (iii) slightly higher returns on value stocks that remain in the same portfolio compared to growth stocks that do not migrate." HT: Jim Mahar at Financeprofessor.com

Finally, Boudoukh, Michaely, Richardson, and Roberts have a forthcoming Journal of Finance piece titled "On the Importance of Payout Yield". They find that "...the widely documented decline in the predictive power of dividends for excess stock returns is due largely to the omission of alternative channels by which firms distribute and receive cash from shareholders. Statistically and economically significant predictability is found in the time series when payout (dividends plus repurchases) and net payout (dividends plus repurchases minus equity issuances) yields are used instead of dividend yield."

That should keep ya busy. Time to catch my train.