Private Equity-Backed IPOs and Long-Run Market Performance Analysis of Italian Firms

We examine the long-run market performance of a sample of family and nonfamily Italian firms that went public from 1995 to 2005, in order to analyse the influence of family ownership and private equity participation on such performance. We first investigate the influence of family ownership and private equity participation on the full sample of firms considered. Afterwards, we restrict our attention to the subset of family firms, with the aim of studying the impact of private equity on their market performance. Symmetrically, we focus on the subsample of private equity backed 1POs and examine the effect of family ownership on this category of firms. As a result, our research does not provide any strong evidence of the expected positive synergies resulting from the association between private equity and family ownership.