Private Equity and the Organization of Firms: Evidence from Latin America

**This is an incomplete entry.** We want to produce one of the first academic studies of private equity in developing countries and the first to our knowledge in Latin America, focusing on Brazil and Mexico, the two largest economies and where private equity is more developed. Thus, our first objective is to perform a descriptive analysis of the PE industry in Latin America, focusing on the contract terms and the returns on the investments; we will try to identify which characteristics of the firms and contracts and which actions undertaken by the PE firms during their ownership period are related to higher returns. Our second objective is to identify the overall impact that private equity in Latin America has had on the following dimensions: - Innovation, using novel patent data from Brazil - Entrepreneurship, looking at both spillover and agglomeration effects of PE - Productivity - Employment, both at a micro level (to understand which employees are affected by PE investment and how) and a macro level - Organizational structure of firms, such as management structure and internal information flows - Governance, such as details of the ownership structure - Bank lending and other forms of financing that might be complements or substitutes to PE financing - Local real economy and welfare effects We will use confidential firm-level datasets from both government agencies and a leading management consulting firm;